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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

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AMIEL’S JOURNAL

AMIEL’S JOURNAL

THE JOURNAL INTIME

OF

HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

TRANSLATED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
Author of “The History of David Grieve,” etc.

WITH A PORTRAIT

VOL. IE

NEW YORK
MACMILLAN AND COMPANY
AND LONDON
1895

All rights reserved

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Copyricut, 1893,
By MACMILLAN AND CO.

First Edition (2 Vols. Globe 8vo) 1885. Second
Edition (x Vol. Crown 8vo) 1888. Reprinted 1889;
January and October, 1890; March and Septem-
ber, 1891, 1892; January and April, 1893; Janu-
ary, August, 1894 ; August, 1895. s

Nortwood Wress :
J. 8. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith.
Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

PQ
2/52
AREZS E

“
)

AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

VOL. II.

[Where no other name is mentioned, Geneva is to
be understood as the author’s place of residence. ]

11th April 1868 (Mornex sur Saléve).—
I left town in a great storm of wind, which
was raising clouds of dust along the sub-
urban roads, and two hours later I found
myself safely installed among the moun-
tains, just like last year. I think of stay-
ing a week here. ... The sounds of the
village are wafted to my open window,
barkings of distant dogs, voices of women
at the fountain, the songs of birds in the
lower orchards. The green carpet of the
plain is dappled by passing shadows thrown
upon it by the clouds; the landscape has
the charm of delicate tint and a sort of
languid grace. Already I am full of a
sense of wellbeing, I am tasting the joys of
that contemplative state in which the soul,
issuing from itself, becomes as it were the

- 24 0847

2 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

soul of a country or a landscape, and feels
living within it a multitude of lives. Here
is no more resistance, negation, blame ;
everything is affirmative ; I feel myself in
harmony with nature and with surround-
ings, of which I seem to myself the ex-
pression. The heart opens to the immensity
of things. This is what Ilove! Nam mihi
res, non me rebus submittere conor.

12th April 1868 (aster Day), Mornex,
Eight a.m. — The day has opened solemnly
and religiously. There is a tinkling of
bells from the valley: even the fields seem
to be breathing forth a canticle of praise. —
Humanity must have a worship, and, all
things considered, is not the Christian wor-
ship the best amongst those which have
existed on a large scale? ‘The religion of
sin, of repentance, and reconciliation — the
religion of the new birth and of eternal
life —is not a religion to be ashamed of.
In spite of all the aberrations of fanaticism,
all the superstitions of formalism, all the
ugly superstructures of hypocrisy, all the
fantastic puerilities of theology, the Gospel
has modified the world and consoled man-
kind. Christian humanity is not much
better than Pagan humanity, but it would

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 3

be much worse without a religion, and
without this religion. Every religion pro-
poses an ideal and a model; the Christian
ideal is sublime, and its model of a divine
beauty. We may hold aloof from the
churches, and yet bow ourselves before
Jesus. Wemay be suspicious of the clergy,
and refuse to have anything to do with
catechisms, and yet love the Holy and the
Just, who came to save and not to curse.
Jesus will always supply us with the best
criticism of Christianity, and when Chris-
tianity has passed away the religion of
Jesus will in all probability survive. After
Jesus as God we shall come back to faith in
the God of Jesus.

Five o'clock p.m.—I have been for a long
walk through Cézargues, Eseri, and the
Yves woods, returning by the Pont du
Loup. The weather was cold and gray. —
A great popular merrymaking of some sort,
with its multitude of blouses, and its drums
and fifes, has been going on riotously for
an hour under my window. The crowd has
sung a number of songs, drinking songs,
ballads, romances, but all more or less
heavy and ugly. The muse has never
touched our country people, and the Swiss

4 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

race is not graceful even in its gaiety.
A bear in high spirits—this is what one
thinks of. The poetry it produces too is des-
perately vulgar and commonplace. Why?
In the first place, because, in spite of the
pretences of our democratic philosophies,
the classes whose backs are bent with man-
ual labour are esthetically inferior to the
others. In the next place, because our old
rustic peasant poetry is dead, and the peas-
ant, when he tries to share the music or the
poetry of the cultivated classes, only suc-
ceeds. in caricaturing it, and not in copying
it. (Democracy, by laying it down that
there is but one class for all men, has in
fact done a wrong to everything that is not
first-rate. As we can no longer without
offence judge men according to a certain
recognised order, we can only compare
them to the best that exists, and then they
naturally seem to us more mediocre, more
ugly, more deformed than before. If the
passion for equality potentially raises the
average, it really degrades nineteen-twen-
tieths of individuals below their former
place. There is a progress in the domain
of law and a falling back in the domain of
art. And meanwhile the artists see multi-
plying before them their béte-noire, the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 5

bourgeois, the Philistine, the presumptuous
ignoramus, the quack who plays at science,
and the feather-brain who thinks himself
the equal of the intelligent.

‘Commonness will prevail,’ as De Can-
dolle said in speaking of the graminaceous
plants. The era of equality means the tri-
umph of mediocrity. It is disappointing,
but inevitable ; for it is one of time’s re-
venges. Humanity, after having organised
itself on the basis of the dissimilarity of
individuals, is now organising itself on the
basis of their similarity, and the one exclu-
sive principle is about as true as the other.
Art no doubt will lose, but justice will gain.
Is not universal levelling-down the law of
nature, and when all has been levelled will
not all have been destroyed? So that the
world is striving with all its force for the
destruction of what it has itself brought
forth! Life is the blind pursuit of its own
negation ; as has been said of the wicked,
nature also works for her own disappoint-
ment, she labours at what she hates, she
weaves her own shroud, and piles up the
stones of her own tomb. God may well
forgive us, for ‘ we know not what we do.’

Just as the sum of force is always iden-
tical in the material universe, and presents

6 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

a spectacle not of diminution nor of aug-
mentation but simply of constant metamor-
phosis, so it is not impossible that the sum
of good is in reality always the same, and
that therefore all progress on one side is
compensated inversely on another side. If
this were so we ought never to say that
period or a people is absolutely and as a
whole superior to another time or another
people, but only that there is superiority in
certain points. The great difference be-
tween man and man would, on these prin-
ciples, consist in the art of transforming
vitality into spirituality, and latent power
into useful energy. The same difference
would hold good between nation and na-
tion, so that the object of the simultaneous
or successive competition of mankind in
history would be the extraction of the max-
imum of humanity from a given amount of
animality. Education, morals, and politics
would be only variations of the same art,
the art of living —that is to say, of disen-
gaging the pure form and subtlest essence
of our individual being.

26th April 1868 (Sunday, Mid-day).—A
gloomy morning. On all sides a depressing
outlook, and within, disgust with self.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. y)

Ten p.M.— Visits and a walk. I have
spent the evening alone. Many things
to-day have taught me lessons of wisdom.
I have seen the hawthorns covering them-
selves with blossom, and the whole valley
springing up afresh under the breath of the
spring. I have been the spectator of faults
of conduct on the part of old men who will
not grow old, and whose heart is in re-
bellion against the natural law. I have
watched the working of marriage in its
frivolous and commonplace forms, and lis-
tened to trivial preaching. I have been a
witness of griefs without hope, of loneliness
that claimed one’s pity. I have listened to
pleasantries on the subject of madness, and
to the merry songs of the birds. And
everything has had the same message for
me: ‘Place yourself once more in harmony
with the universal law; accept the will of
God; make a religious use of life; work
while it is yet day ; be at once serious and
cheerful; know how to repeat with the
Apostle, ‘‘I have learned in whatsoever
state I am therewith to be content.’’’

26th August 1868.— After all the storms
of feeling within and the organic disturb-
ances without, which during these latter

8 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

months have pinned me so closely to my
own individual existence, shall I ever be
able to reascend into the region of pure
intelligence, to enter again upon the disin-
terested and impersonal life, to recover my
old indifference towards subjective miseries,
and regain a purely scientific and contem-
plative state of mind? Shall I ever suc-
ceed in forgetting all the needs which bind
me to earth and to humanity? Shall I
ever become pure spirit? Alas! I cannot
persuade myself to believe it possible for
an instant. I see infirmity and weakness
close upon me, I feel I cannot do without
affection, and I know that I have no ambi-
tion, and that my faculties are declining. I
| remember that I am forty-seven years old,
| and that all my brood of youthful hopes
| has flown away. So that there is no de-
ceiving myself as to the fate which awaits
me : — increasing loneliness, mortification
_ of spirit, long-continued regret, melancholy
_ neither to be consoled nor confessed, a
mournful old age, a slow decay, a death in
_ the desert !

Terrible dilemma! Whatever is still pos-
‘sible to me has lost its sayour, while all
that I could still desire escapes me, and
will always escape me. Every impulse

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 9

ends in weariness and disappointment.
Discouragement, depression, weakness, apa-
thy: there is the dismal series which must
be for ever begun and re-begun, while we
are still rolling up the Sisyphean rock of
life. Is it not simpler and shorter to plunge
head-foremost into the gulf ?

No, rebel as we may, there is but one
solution —to submit to the general order,
to accept, to resign ourselves, and to do
still what we can. It is our self-will, our
aspirations, our dreams, that must be sacri-
ficed. We must give up the hope of happi-
ness once for all! Immolation of the self
—death to self, —this is the only suicide
which is either useful or permitted. In my
present mood of indifference and disinter-
estedness, there is some secret ill-humour,
some wounded pride, a little rancour ; there
is selfishness in short, since a premature
claim for rest is implied in it. Absolute
disinterestedness is only reached in that
perfect humility which tramples the self
under foot for the glory of God.

I have no more strength left, I wish for
nothing ; but that is not what is wanted.
I must wish what God wishes ; I must pass
from indifference to sacrifice, and from sac-
rifice to self-devotion. The cup which I

10 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

would fain put away from me is the misery
of living, the shame of existing and suffer-
ing as acommon creature who has missed
his vocation ; it is the bitter and increasing
humiliation of declining power, of growing
old under the weight of one’s own disap-
proval, and the disappointment of one’s
friends! ‘ Wilt thou be healed?’ was the
text of last Sunday’s sermon. ‘Come to
me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.’ —‘ And if our
heart condemn us, God is greater than our
heart.’

27th August 1868. — To-day I took up
the Penseroso1 again. I have often vio-
lated its maxims and forgotten its lessons.
Still, this volume is a true son of my soul,
and breathes the true spirit of the inner
life. Whenever I wish to revive my con-
sciousness of my own tradition, it is pleas-
ant to me to read over this little gnomic
collection which has had such scant justice
done to it, and which, were it another’s, I
should often quote. I like to feel that in
it I have attained to that relative truth
which may be defined as consistency with
self, the harmony of appearance with real-
ity, of thought with expression, — in other

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. II

words, sincerity, ingenuousness, inward-
ness. It is personal experience in the
strictest sense of the word.

21st September 1868 ( Villars).— A lovely
autumn effect. Everything was veiled in
gloom this morning, and a gray mist of rain
floated between us and the whole circle of
mountains. Now the strip of blue sky
which made its appearance at first behind
the distant peaks has grown larger, has
mounted to the zenith, and the dome of
heaven, swept almost clear of cloud, sends
streaming down upon us the pale rays of a
convalescent sun. The day now promises
kindly, and all is well that ends well.

Thus after a season of tears a sober and
softened joy may return to us. Say to
yourself that you are entering upon the
autumn of your life; that the graces of
spring and the splendours of summer are
irrevocably gone, but that autumn too has
its beauties. The autumn weather is often
darkened by rain, cloud, and mist, but the
air is still soft, and the sun still delights
the eyes, and touches the yellowing leaves
caressingly: it is the time for fruit, for
harvest, for the vintage, the moment for
making provision for the winter. — Here

AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

= we a

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 13

upon one an impression of parti pris. A
philosophy of religion, apart from the com-
parative science of religions, and apart also
from a disinterested and general philosophy
of history, must always be more or less
arbitrary and factitious, It is only pseudo-
scientific, this reduction of human life to
three spheres — industry, law, and religion.
The author seems to me to possess a vigor-
ous and profound mind, rather than a free
mind. Not only is he dogmatic, but he
dogmatises in fayour of a given religion,
to which his whole allegiance is pledged.
Besides, Christianity, being an X which
each church defines in its own way, the
author takes the same liberty, and defines
the X in his way; so that he is at once
too free and not free enough; too free in
respect to historical Christianity, not free
enough in respect to Christianity as a par-
ticular church. He does not satisfy the
believing Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed
Churchman, or Catholic ; and he does not
satisfy the freethinker. This Schellingian
type of speculation, which consists in logi-
cally deducing a particular religion — that
is to say, in making philosophy the servant
of Christian theology — is a legacy-from the
Middle Ages.

14 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

After belief comes judgment; but a be-
liever is not a judge. A fish lives in the
ocean, but it cannot see all round it; it
cannot take a view of the whole: therefore
it cannot judge what the ocean is. In order
to understand Christianity we must put it
in its historical place in its proper frame-
work ; we must regard it as a part of the
religious development of humanity, and so
judge it, not from a Christian point of view,
but from a human point of view, sine ira
nec studio.

16th December 1868. —I am in the most
painful state of anxiety as to my poor kind
friend, Charles Heim. ... Since the 30th
November I have had no letter from the dear
invalid, who then said his last farewell to me.
How long these two weeks have seemed
to me, —and how keenly I have realised
that strong craving which many feel for the
last words, the last looks, of those they love !
Such words and looks are a kind of testa-
ment. They have a solemn and sacred char-
acter which is not merely an effect of our
imagination. For that which is on the brink
of death already participates to some extent
in eternity. A dying man seems to speak
to us from beyond the tomb; what he says

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 15

has the effect upon us of a sentence, an
oracle, an injunction ; we look upon him as
one endowed with second sight. Serious
and solemn words come naturally to the
man who feels life escaping him, and the
grave opening before him. The depths of
his nature are then revealed; the Divine
within him need no longer hide itself. Oh!
do not let us wait to be just or pitiful or
demonstrative towards those we love until
they or we are struck down by illness or
threatened with death! Life is short, and
we have never too much time for gladden-
ing the hearts of those who are travelling
the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to
love, make haste to be kind !

26th December 1868.—My dear friend
died this morning at Hyéres. A beautiful
soul has returned to heaven. So he has
ceased to suffer! Is he happy now ?

If men are aitage more or te Heccived
on the subject of women, it is because they
forget that they and women do not speak
altogether the same language, and that
words have not the same weight or the
same meaning for them, especially in ques-
tions of feeling. Whether from shyness

16 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

or precaution or artifice, a woman never
speaks out her whole thought, and more-
over what she herself knows of it is but
a part of what it really is. Complete
frankness seems to be impossible to her,
and complete self-knowledge seems to be
forbidden her. If she is a sphinx to us, it
is because she is a riddle of doubtful mean-
ing even to herself. She has no need of
perfidy, for she is mystery itself. A woman
is something fugitive, irrational, indeter-
minable, illogical, and contradictory. A
great deal of forbearance ought to be shown
her, and a good deal of prudence exercised
with regard to her, for she may bring about
innumerable evils without knowing it. Ca-
pable of all kinds of devotion, and of all
kinds of treason, ‘monstre incompréhen-
sible,’ raised to the second power, she is at
once the delight and the terror of man.

The more a man loves, the more he suf-
fers. The sum of possible grief for each
soul is in proportion to its degree of per-
fection.

He whois too much afraid of being duped
has lost the power of being magnanimous,

. . . . . . .

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 17

Doubt of the reality of love ends by
making us doubt everything. The final
result of all deceptions and disappointments
is atheism, which may not always yield up
its name and secret, but which lurks,
a masked spectre, within the depths of
thought, as the last supreme explainer.
‘Man is what his love is,’ and follows the
fortunes of his love.

The beautiful souls of the world have an
art of saintly alchemy, by which bitterness
is converted into kindness, the gall of
human experience into gentleness, ingrati-
tude into benefits, insults into pardon. And
the transformation ought to become so easy
and habitual that the lookers-on may think it
spontaneous, and nobody give us credit for it.

27th January 1869.— What, then, is the
service rendered to the world by Christi-
anity ? The proclamation of ‘ good news.’
And what is this ‘good news’? The pardon
of sin. The God of holiness loving the
world and reconciling it to Himself by
Jesus, in order to establish the kingdom of
God, the city of souls, the life of heaven
upon earth, — here you have the whole of
it; but in this is a revolution. ‘Love ye

18 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

one another, as I have loved you;’ ‘Be
ye one with me, as I am one with the
Father:’ for this is life eternal, here is
perfection, salvation, joy. Faith in the
fatherly love of God, who punishes and
pardons for our good, and who desires not
the death of the sinner, but his conversion
and his life, —here is the motive power of
the redeemed.

What we call Christianity is a vast ocean,
into which flow a number of spiritual
currents of distant and various origin ;
certain religions, that is to say, of Asia and
of Europe, the great ideas of Greek wisdom,
and especially those of Platonism. Neither
its doctrine nor its morality, as they have
been historically developed, are new or
spontaneous. What is essential and original
in it is the practical demonstration that the
human and the divine nature may co-exist,
may become fused into one sublime flame ;
that holiness and pity, justice and_ mercy,
may meet together and become one, in
man and in God. What is specific in
Christianity is Jesus—the religious con-
sciousness of Jesus. The sacred sense of
his absolute union with God through perfect
love and self-surrender, this profound, in-
vincible, and tranquil faith of his, has

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 19

become a religion; the faith of Jesus has
become the faith of millions and millions
of men. From this torch has sprung a
vast conflagration. And such has been
the brilliancy and the radiance both of
revealer and revelation, that the astonished
world has forgotten its justice in its ad-
miration, and has referred to one single
benefactor the whole of those benefits which
are its heritage from the past.

The conversion of ecclesiastical and con-
fessional Christianity into historical Christi-
anity is the work of Biblical science. The
conversion of historical Christianity into
philosophical Christianity is an attempt
which is to some extent an illusion, since
faith cannot be entirely resolved into
science. The transference, however, of
Christianity from the region of history to
the region of psychology is the great crav-
ing of our time. What we are trying to
arrive at is the eternal Gospel. But before
we can reach it, the comparative history
and philosophy of religions must assign to
Christianity its true place, and must judge
it. The religion too which Jesus professed
must be disentangled from the religion
which has taken Jesus for its object. Ard
when at last we are able to point out the

20 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

state of consciousness which is the primitive
cell, the principle of the eternal Gospel, we
shall have reached our goal, for in it is the
punctum saliens of pure religion.

Perhaps the extraordinary will take the
place of the supernatural, and the great
geniuses of the world will come to be
regarded as the messengers of God in
history, as the providential revealers through
whom the spirit of God works upon the
human mass. What is perishing is not
the admirable and the adorable ; it is simply
the arbitrary, the accidental, the miraculous,
Just as the poor illuminations of a village
Séte, or the tapers of a procession, are put
out by the great marvel of the sun, so the
small local miracles, with their meanness
and doubtfulness, will sink into insignifi-
cance beside the law of the world of
spirits, the incomparable spectacle of human
history, led by that all-powerful Dramatur-
gus whom we call God. — Utinam!

1st March 1869. — Impartiality and ob-
jectivity are as rare as justice, of which
they are but two special forms, Self-
interest is an inexhaustible source of con-
venient illusions. The number of beings
who wish to see truly is extraordinarily

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 21

small. What governs men is the fear of
truth, unless truth is useful to them, which
is as much as to say that self-interest is
the principle of the common philosophy, or
that truth is made for us but not we for
truth. — As this fact is humiliating, the
majority of people will neither recognise
nor admit it. And thus a prejudice of
self-love protects all the prejudices of the
understanding, which are themselves the
result of a stratagem of the ego. Humanity
has always slain or persecuted those who
have disturbed this selfish repose of hers.
She only improves in spite of herself. The
only progress which she desires is an in-
crease of enjoyments. All advances in
justice, in morality, in holiness, have been
imposed upon or forced from her by some
noble violence. Sacrifice, which is the pas-
sion of great souls, has never been the law
of societies. It is too often by employing
one vice against another, —for example,
vanity against cupidity, greed against idle-
ness, —that the great agitators have broken
through routine. In a word, the human
world is almost entirely directed by the
law of nature, and the law of the spirit,
which is the leaven of its coarse paste, has
but rarely succeeded in raising it into gen-
erous expansion.

22 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

From the point of view of the ideal,
humanity is triste and ugly. But if we
compare it with its probable origins, we see
that the human race has not altogether
wasted its time. Hence there are three
possible views of history: the view of the
pessimist, who starts from the ideal; the
view of the optimist, who compares the past
with the present ; and the view of the hero-
worshipper, who sees that all progress what-
ever has cost oceans of blood and tears.

European hypocrisy veils its face before
the voluntary suicide of those Indian fanat-
ics who throw themselves under the wheels
of their goddess’s triumphal car. And yet
these sacrifices are but the symbol of what
goes on in Europe as elsewhere, of that
offering of their life which is made by the
martyrs of all great causes. We may even
say that the fierce and sanguinary goddess is
humanity itself, which is only spurred to
progress by remorse, and repents only when
the measure of its crimes runs over. The
fanatics who sacrifice themselves are an
eternal protest against the universal self-
ishness. We have only overthrown those
idols which are tangible and visible, but
perpetual sacrifice still exists everywhere,
and everywhere the élite of each generation

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 23

suffers for the salvation of the multitude.
It is the austere, bitter, and mysterious law
of solidarity. Perdition and redemption in
and through each other is the destiny of
men.

18th March 1869 (Thursday). — When-
ever I come back from a walk outside the
town I am disgusted and repelled by this
cell of mine. Out of doors sunshine, birds,
spring, beauty, and life ; in here, ugliness,
piles of paper, melancholy, and death. —
And yet my walk was one of the saddest
possible. I wandered along the Rhone and
the Arve, and all the memories of the past,
all the disappointments of the present, and
all the anxieties of the future, laid siege to
my heart like a whirlwind of phantoms. i
took account of my faults, and they ranged
themselves in battle against me. The vult-
ure of regret gnawed at my heart, and the
sense of the irreparable choked me like the
iron collar of the pillory. It seemed to me
that I had failed in the task of life, and that
now life was failing me.— Ah! how ter-
rible spring is to the lonely! All the needs
which had been lulled to sleep start into
life again, all the sorrows which had dis-
appeared are reborn, and the old man

24 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

which had been gagged and conquered rises
once more and makes his groans heard.
It is as though all the old wounds opened
and bewailed themselves afresh. Just
when one had ceased to think, when one
had succeeded in deadening feeling by work
or by amusement, all of a sudden the heart,
solitary captive that it is, sends a cry from
its prison depths, a cry which shakes to its
foundations the whole surrounding edifice.
Even supposing that one had freed one-
self from all other fatalities, there is still
one yoke left from which it is impossible to
escape —that of Time. I have succeeded
in avoiding all other servitudes, but I had
reckoned without the last —the servitude
of age. Age comes, and its weight is equal
to that of all other oppressions taken to-
gether. Man, under his mortal aspect, is
but a species of ephemera. As I looked at
the banks of the Rhone, which have seen
the river flowing past them some ten or
twenty thousand years, or at the trees
forming the avenue of the cemetery, which,
for two centuries, have been the witnesses
of so many funeral processions; as I recog-
nised the walls, the dykes, the paths, which
saw me playing as a child, and watched
other children running over that grassy

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 25

plain of Plain Palais which bore my own
childish steps, —I had the sharpest sense
of the emptiness of life and the flight of
things. I felt the shadow of the upas tree
darkening over me. I gazed into the great
implacable abyss in which are swallowed
up all those phantoms which call them-
selves living beings. I saw that the living
are but apparitions hovering for a moment
over the earth, made out of the ashes of
the dead, and swiftly re-absorbed by eternal
night, as the will-o’-the-wisp sinks into the
marsh. The nothingness of our joys, the
emptiness of our existence, and the futility
of our ambitions, filled me with a quiet dis-
gust. From regret to disenchantment I
floated on to Buddhism, to universal weari-
ness. — Ah, the hope of a blessed immor-
tality would be better worth having !

With what different eyes one looks at
life at ten, at twenty, at thirty, at sixty!
Those who live alone are specially con-
scious of this psychological metamorphosis.
Another thing, too, astonishes them ; it is
the universal conspiracy which exists for
hiding the sadness of the world, for mak-
ing men forget suffering, sickness, and
death, for smothering the wails and sobs
which issue from every house, for painting

26 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

and beautifying the hideous face of reality.
Is it out of tenderness for childhood and
youth, or is it simply from fear, that we
are thus careful to veil the sinister truth ?
Or is it from a sense of equity ? and does
life contain as much good as evil — perhaps
more? However it may be, men feed
themselves rather upon illusion than upon
truth. Each one unwinds his own special
reel of hope, and as soon as he has come to
the end of it he sits him down to die, and
lets his sons and his grandsons begin the
same experience over again. We all purse
happiness, and happiness escapes the pur-
suit of all.

The only viaticum which can help us in
the journey of life is that furnished by a
great duty and some serious affections.
And even affections die, or at least their
objects are mortal; a friend, a wife, a
child, a country, a church, may precede
us in the tomb; duty alone lasts as long
as we.

This maxim exorcises the spirits of revolt,
of anger, discouragement, vengeance, indig-
nation, and ambition, which rise one after
another to tempt and trouble the heart,
swelling with the sap of the spring. —O all
ye saints of the East, of antiquity, of Chris-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 29

tianity, phalanx of heroes !— Ye too drank
deep of weariness and agony of soul, but
ye triumphed over both. Ye who have
come forth victors from the strife, shelter
us under your palms, fortify us by your
example !

6th April 1869. — Magnificent weather.
The Alps are dazzling under their silver
haze. Sensations of all kinds have been
crowding upon me; the delights of a walk
under the rising sun, the charms of a won-
derful view, longing for travel, and thirst
for joy, hunger for work, for emotion, for
life, dreams of happiness and of love. A
passionate wish to live, to feel, to express,
stirred the depths of my heart. It was a
sudden re-awakening of youth, a flash of
poetry, a renewing of the soul, a fresh
growth of the wings of desire. I was over-
powered by a host of conquering, vagabond,
adventurous aspirations. I forgot my age,
my obligations, my duties, my vexations,
and youth leapt within me as though life
were beginning again. It was as though
something explosive had caught fire, and
one’s soul were scattered to the four winds ;
in such a mood one would fain devour the
whole world, experience everything, see

28 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

everything. Faust’s ambition enters into
one, universal desire, —a horror of one’s
own prison cell. One throws off one’s hair
shirt, and one would fain gather the whole
of nature into one’s arms and heart. O ye
passions, a ray of sunshine is enough to
rekindle you all! The cold black moun-
tain is a volcano once more, and melts its
snowy crown with one single gust of flam-
ing breath. It is the spring which brings
about these sudden and improbable resur-
rections, the spring which, sending a thrill
and tumult of life through all that lives, is
the parent of impetuous desires, of over-
powering inclinations, of unforeseen and
inextinguishable outbursts of passion. It
breaks through the rigid bark of the trees,
and rends the mask on the face of asceti-
cism; it makes the monk tremble in the
shadow of his convent, the maiden behind
the curtains of her room, the child sitting
on his school bench, the old man bowed
under his rheumatism.

*O Hymen, Hymenze !’

24th April 1869.— Is Nemesis indeed more
real than Providence, the jealous God more
true than the good God ? —grief more cer-
tain than joy ?—darkness more secure of

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 29

victory than light? Is it pessimism or op-
timism which is nearest the truth, and
which — Leibnitz or Schopenhauer — has
best understood the universe? Is it the
healthy man or the sick man who sees best
to the bottom of things ? which is in the
right ?

Ah! the problem of grief and evil is and
will be always the greatest enigma of being,
only second to the existence of being itself.
The common faith of humanity has assumed
the victory of good over evil. But if good
consists not in the result of victory, but in
victory itself, then good implies an inces-
sant and infinite contest, interminable
struggle, and a success for ever threatened.
And if this is life, is not Buddha right in
regarding life as synonymous with evil,
since it means perpetual restlessness and
endless war? Repose according to the
Buddhist is only to be found in annihila-~
tion. The art of self-annihilation, of es-
caping the world’s vast machinery of
suffering, and the misery of renewed exist-
ence,—the art of reaching Nirvana, is to
him the supreme art, the only means of
deliverance. The Christian says to God:
Deliver us from evil. The Buddhist adds:
And to that end deliver us from finite exist-

30 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

ence, give us back to nothingness! The
first believes that when he is enfranchised
from the body he will enter upon eternal
happiness; the second believes that indi-
viduality is the obstacle to all repose, and
he longs for the dissolution of the soul
itself. The dread of the first is the Para-
dise of the second.

One thing only is necessary, —the com-
mittal of the soul to God. Look that thou
thyself art in order, and leave to God the
task of unravelling the skein of the world
and of destiny. What do annihilation or
immortality matter? What is to be, will
be. And what will be, will be for the best.
Faith in good,—perhaps the individual
wants nothing more for his passage through
life. Only he must have taken sides with
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno, against
materialism, against the religion of accident
and pessimism. Perhaps also he must
make up his mind against the Buddhist
nihilism, because a man’s system of con-
duct is diametrically opposite according as
he labours to increase his life or to lessen
it, according as he aims at cultivating his
faculties or at systematically deadening
them.

To employ one’s individual efforts for

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 31

the increase of good in the world, — this
modest ideal is enough for us. To help
forward the victory of good has been the
common aim of saints and sages. Soci
Dei sumus was the word of Seneca, who
had it from Cleanthus,

80th April 1869.—I have just finished
Vacherot’s® book (La Religion, 1869),
and it has set me thinking. I have a feel-
ing that his notion of religion is not rig-
orous and exact, and that therefore his
logic is subject to correction. If religion is
a psychological stage, anterior to that of
reason, it is clear that it will disappear in
man, but if, on the contrary, it is a mode
of the inner life, it may and must last, as
long as the need of feeling, and alongside
the need of thinking. The question is be- .
tween theism and non-theism. If God is
only the category of the ideal, religion will
vanish, of course, like the illusions of youth.
But if Universal Being can be felt and loved
at the same time as conceived, the philoso~
pher may be a religious man just as he may
be an artist, an orator, or a citizen. He
may attach himself to a worship or ritual
without derogation. I myself incline to
this solution. To me religion is life before
God and in God.

32 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

And even if God were defined as the uni-
versal life, so long as this life is positive
and not negative, the soul penetrated with
the sense of the infinite is in the religious
state. Religion differs from philosophy as
the simple and spontaneous self differs from
the reflecting self, as synthetic intuition
differs from intellectual analysis. We are
initiated into the religious state by a sense
of voluntary dependence on and joyful sub-
mission to the principle of order and of
goodness. Religious emotion makes man
conscious of himself ; he finds his own place
within the infinite unity, and it is this per-
ception which is sacred.

But in spite of these reservations I am
much impressed by the book, which is a
fine piece of work, ripe and serious in all
respects.

13th May 1869.— A break in the clouds,
and through the blue interstices a. bright
sun throws flickering and uncertain rays.
Storms, smiles, whims, anger, tears, — it
is May, and nature is in its feminine phase !
She pleases our fancy, stirs our heart, and
wears out our reason by the endless succes-
sion of her caprices and the unexpected
violence of her whims.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 33

This recalls to me the 213th verse of the
second book of the Laws of Manou. ‘It
is in the nature of the feminine sex to seek
here below to corrupt men, and therefore
wise men never abandon themselves to the
seductions of women.’ The same code,
however, says: ‘ Wherever women are
honoured the gods are satisfied.’ And
again: ‘In every family where the husband
takes pleasure in his wife, and the wife in
her husband, happiness is ensured.’ And
again: ‘One mother is more venerable than
a thousand fathers.’ But knowing what
stormy and irrational elements there are in
this fragile and delightful creature, Manou
concludes: ‘At no age ought a woman to
be allowed to govern herself as she pleases.’

Up to the present day, in several contem-
porary and neighbouring codes, a woman is
a minor all her life. Why? Because of
her dependence upon nature, and of her
subjection to passions which are the di-
minutives of madness; in other words, be-
cause the soul of a woman has something
obscure and mysterious in it, which lends
itself to all superstitions and weakens the
energies of man. To man belong law,
justice, science, and philosophy, all that
is disinterested, universal, and rational.

34 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Women, on the contrary, introduce into
everything favour, exception, and personal
prejudice. As soon as a man, a people, a
literature, an epoch, become feminine in
type, they sink in the scale of things. As
soon as a woman quits the state of subordi-
nation in which her merits have free play,
we see a rapid increase in her natural de-
fects. Complete equality with man makes
her quarrelsome ; a position of supremacy
makes her tyrannical. To honour her and
to govern her will be for a long time yet
the best solution. When education has
formed strong, noble, and serious women
in whom conscience and reason hold sway
over the effervescence of fancy and seuti-
mentality, then we shall be able not only
to honour woman, but to make a serious
end of gaining her consent and adhesion,
Then she will be truly an equal, a work-
fellow, a companion. At present she is so
only in theory. The moderns are at work
upon the problem, and have not solved it
yet.

15th June 1869. — The great defect of lib-
eral Christianity * is that its conception of
holiness is a frivolous one, or, what comes
to the same thing, its conception of sin is a

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 35

superficial one. The defects of the baser
sort of political liberalism recur in liberal
Christianity ; it is only half serious, and its
theology is too much mixed with worldli-
ness. The sincerely pious folk look tpon
the liberals as persons whose talk is rather
profane, and who offend religious feelings
by making sacred subjects a theme for rhe-
torical display. They shock the convenances
of sentiment, and affront the delicacy of
conscience by the indiscreet familiarities
they take with the great mysteries of the
inner life. They seem to be mere clever
special pleaders, religious rhetoricians like
the Greek sophisis, rather than guides in
the narrow road which leads to salvation.

It is not to the clever folk, nor even to
the scientific folk, that the empire over
souls belongs, but to those who impress us
as having conquered nature by grace, as
having passed through the burning bush,
and as speaking, not the language of human
wisdom, but that of the divine will. In
religious matters it is holiness which gives
authority ; it is love, or the power of devo-
tion and sacrifice, which goes to the heart,
which moves and persuades.

What all religious, poetical, pure, and
tender souls are least able to pardon is the

36 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

diminution or degradation of their ideal.
We must never rouse an ideal against us;
our business is to point men to another
ideal, purer, higher, more spiritual than the
old, and so to raise behind a lofty summit
one more lofty still. In this way no one is
despoiled ; we gain men’s confidence, while
at the same time forcing them to think, and
enabling those minds which are already
tending towards change to perceive new
objects and goals for thought. Only that
which is replaced is destroyed, and an ideal
is only replaced by satisfying the conditions
of the old with some advantages over.

Let the liberal Protestants offer us a spec-
tacle of Christian virtue of a holier, intenser,
and more intimate kind than before ; let us
see it active in their persons and in their
influence, and they will have furnished the
proof demanded by the Master: the tree
will be judged by its fruits.

22d June 1869 (Nine a.m.) —Gray and
lowering weather. — A fly lies dead of cold
on the page of my book, in full summer!
What is life? I said to myself, as I looked
at the tiny dead creature. It is a loan, as
movement is. The universal life is a sum
total, of which the units are visible here,

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. Ky

there, and everywhere, just as an electric
wheel throws off sparks along its whole sur-
face. Life passes through us; we do not
possess it. Hirn admits three ultimate prin-
ciples: 5 the atom, the force, the soul; the
force which acts upon atoms, the soul which
acts upon force. Probably he distinguishes
between anonymous souls and personal
souls. Then my fly would be an anony-
mous soul.

(Same day.) —The national churches are
all up in arms against so-called Liberal
Christianity ; Basle and Zurich began the
fight, and now Geneva has entered the lists
too. Gradually it is becoming plain that
historical Protestantism has no longer a
raison d’étre between pure liberty and pure
authority. It is, in fact, a provisional stage,
founded on the worship of the Bible — that
is to say, on the idea of a written revela-
tion, and of a book divinely inspired, and
therefore authoritative. When once this
thesis has been relegated to the rank of a
fiction Protestantism crumbles away. There
is nothing for it but to retire upon natural
religion, or the religion of the moral con-
sciousness. MM. Réville, Coquerel, Fon-
tanés, Buisson,® accept this logical outcome.

2410847

38 AMIEL’S JOURNAL,

They are the advance-guard of Protestant-
ism and the laggards of free thought.

Their mistake is in not seeing that all
institutions rest upon a legal fiction, and
that every living thing involves a logical
absurdity. It may be logical to demand a
church based on free examination and abso-
lute sincerity ; but to realise it is a different
matter. A church lives by what is positive,
and this positive element necessarily limits
investigation. People confound the right
of the individual, which is to be free, with
the duty of the institution, which is to be
something. They take the principle of
Science to be the same as the principle of
the Church, which is a mistake. They will
not see that Religion is different from Phi-
losophy, and that the one seeks union by
faith, while the other upholds the solitary
independence of thought. That the bread
should be good it must have Jeaven ; but
the leaven is not the bread. Liberty is the
means whereby we arrive at an enlightened
faith — granted ; but an assembly of people
agreeing only upon this criterion and this
method could not possibly found a church,
for they might differ completely as to the
results of the method. Suppose a news-
paper the writers of which were of all pos-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 39

sible parties, —it would no doubt be a
curiosity in journalism, but it would have
no opinions, no faith, no creed. A drawing-
room filled with refined people, carrying on
polite discussion, is not a church, and a
dispute, however courteous, is not worship.
It is a mere confusion of kinds.

13th July 1869. — Lamennais, Heine —
the one the victim of a mistaken vocation,
the other of a tormenting craving to astonish
and mystify his kind. The first was want-
ing in common sense; the second was
wanting in seriousness. The Frenchman
was violent, arbitrary, domineering; the
German was a jesting Mephistopheles, with
a horror of Philistinism. The Breton was
all passion and melancholy ; the Hamburger,
all fancy and satire. Neither developed
freely nor normally. Both of them, be-
cause of an initial mistake, threw them-
selves into an endless quarrel with the world.
Both were revolutionists. They were not
fighting for the good cause, for impersonal
truth ; both were rather the champions of
their own pride. Both suffered greatly,
and died isolated, repudiated, and reviled.
Men of magnificent talents, both of them,
but men of small wisdom, who did more

40 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

harm than good to themselves and to
others ! —It is a lamentable existence which
wears itself out in maintaining a first an-
tagonism, or a first blunder. The greater a
man’s intellectual power, the more danger-
ous is it for him to make a false start and
to begin life badly.

20th July 1869.—I have been reading
over again five or six chapters, here and
there, of Renan’s St. Paul. Analysed to
the bottom, the writer is a freethinker, but
a freethinker whose flexible imagination
still allows him the delicate epicurism of
religious emotion. In his eyes the man
who will not lend himself to these graceful
fancies is vulgar, and the man who takes
them seriously is prejudiced. He is enter-
tained by the variations of conscience, but
he is too clever to laugh at them. The true
critic neither concludes nor excludes; his
pleasure is to understand without believing,
and to profit by the results of enthusiasm,
while still maintaining a free mind, unem-
barrassed by illusion. Such a mode of pro-
ceeding has a look of dishonesty; it is
nothing, however, but the good-tempered
irony of a highly-cultivated mind, which
will neither be ignorant of anything nor

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 4I

duped by anything. It is the dilettanteism
of the Renaissance in its perfection. — At
the same time what innumerable procfs of
insight and of exultant scientific power !

14th August 1869.—In the name of
Heaven, who art thou ?—what wilt thou
—wavering inconstant creature? What
future lies before thee? What duty or
what hope appeals to thee ?

My longing, my search is for love, for
peace, for something to fill my heart; an
idea to defend ; a work to which I might
devote the rest of my strength; an affection
which might quench this inner thirst; a
cause for which I might die with joy. But
shall I ever find them? TI long for all that
is impossible and inaccessible: for true re-
ligion, serious sympathy, the ideal life ; for
paradise, immortality, holiness, faith, in-
spiration, and I know not what besides!

What I really want is to die and to be born |

again, transformed myself, and in a differ-
ent world. And I can neither stifle these
aspirations nor deceive myself as to the
possibility of satisfying them. I seem con-
demned to roll for ever the rock of Sisyphus,

ae

and to feel that slow wearing away of the /

mind which befalls the man whose vocation /

42 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

and destiny are in perpetual conflict. ‘A
Christian heart and a pagan head,’ like
Jacobi; tenderness and pride; width of
mind and feebleness of will; the two men
of St. Paul; a seething chaos of contrasts,
antinomies, and contradictions; humility
and pride ; childish simplicity and bound-
less mistrust; analysis and intuition ; pa-
tience and irritability ; kindness and dry-
ness of heart; carelessness and anxiety ;
enthusiasm and languor; indifference and
passion ; altogether a being incomprehensi-
ble and intolerable to myself and to others !

Then from a state of conflict I fall back
into the fluid, vague, indeterminate state,
which feels all form to be a mere violence
and disfigurement. All ideas, principles,
acquirements, and habits are effaced in me
like the ripples on a wave, like the convo-
lutions of a cloud. My personality has the
least possible admixture of individuality. I
am to the great majority of men what the
circle is to rectilinear figures ; Iam every-
where at home, because I have no particu~
lar and nominative self. — Perhaps, on the
whole, this defect has good in it. Though
I am less of a man, I am perhaps nearer to
the man ; perhaps rather more man. There
is less of the individual, but more of the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 43

species, in me. My nature, which is abso-
lutely unsuited for practical life, shows
great aptitude for psychological study. It
prevents me from taking sides, but it allows
me to understand all sides. It is not only
indolence which prevents me from drawing
conclusions ; it is a sort of a secret aversion
to all intellectual proscription. I have a
feeling that something of everything is
wanted to make a world, that all citizens
have a right in the State, and that if every
opinion is equally insignificant in itself, all
opinions have some hold upon truth. To
live and let live, think and let think, are
maxims which are equally dear tome. My
tendency is always to the whole, to the
totality, to the general balance of things.
What is difficult to me is to exclude, to
condemn, to say no; except, indeed, in the
presence of the exclusive. I am always
fighting for the absent, for the defeated
cause, for that portion of truth which seems
to me neglected; my aim is to complete
every thesis, to see round every problem, to
study a thing from all its possible sides.
Is this scepticism? Yes, in its result, but
not in its purpose. It is rather the sense
of the absolute and the infinite reducing to
their proper value and relegating to their
proper place the finite and the relative.

44 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

But here, in the same way, my ambition
is greater than my power ; my philosophi-
cal perception is superior to my speculative
gift. I have not the energy of my opinions ;
I have far greater width than inventiveness
of thought, and, from timidity, I have al-
lowed the critical intelligence in me to
swallow up the creative genius. —Is it in-
deed from timidity ?

Alas ! with a little more ambition, or a
little more good luck, a different man might
have been made out of me, and such as my
youth gave promise of.

16th August 1869. —I have been think-
ing over Schopenhauer. — It has struck me
and almost terrified me to see how well I
represent Schopenhauer’s typical man, for
whom ‘happiness is a chimera and suffer-
ing a reality,’ for whom ‘the negation of
will and of desire is the only road to de-
liverance,’ and ‘the individual life is a
misfortune from which impersonal contem-
plation is the only enfranchisement,’ etc.
But the principle that life is an evil and an-
nihilation a good lies at the root of the
system, and this axiom I have never dared
to enunciate in any general way, although I
have admitted it here and there in individ-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 45

ual cases. — What I still like in the misan-
thrope of Frankfort, is his antipathy to
current prejudice, to European hobbies, to
Western hypocrisies, to the successes of the
day. Schopenhauer is a man of powerful
mind, who has put away from him all illu-
sions, who professes Buddhism in the full
flow of modern Germany, and absolute de-
tachment of mind in the very midst of the
nineteenth-century orgie. His great defects
are barrenness of soul, a proud and perfect
selfishness, an adoration of genius which is
combined with complete indifference to the
rest of the world, in spite of all his teaching
of resignation and sacrifice. He has no
sympathy, no humanity, no love. And
here I recognise the unlikeness between us.
Pure intelligence and solitary labour might
easily lead me to his point of view; but
once appeal to the heart, and I feel the con-
templative attitude untenable. Pity, good-
ness, charity, and devotion reclaim their
rights, and insist even upon the first place.

29th August 1869. — Schopenhauer
preaches impersonality, objectivity, pure
contemplation, the negation of will, calm-
ness, and disinterestedness, an esthetic
study of the world, detachment from life,

46 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

the renunciation of all desire, solitary medi-
tation, disdain of the crowd, and indif-
ference to all that the vulgar covet. He
approves all my defects, my childishness, my
aversion to practical life, my antipathy to
the utilitarians, my distrust of all desire.
In a word, he flatters all my instincts; he
caresses and justifies them.

This pre-established harmony between
the theory of Schopenhauer and my own nat-
ural man causes me pleasure mingled with
terror. I might indulge myself in the pleas-
ure, but that I fear to delude and stifle con-
science. Besides, I feel that goodness has no
tolerance for this contemplative indifference,
and that virtue consists in self-conquest.

30th August 1869.— Still some chapters
of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer believes
in the unchangeableness of innate ten-
dencies in the individual, and in the invari-
ability of the primitive disposition. He
refuses to believe in the new man, in any
real progress towards perfection, or in any
positive improvement in a human being.
Only the appearances are refined; there is
no change below the surface. Perhaps he
confuses temperament, character, and in-
dividuality ? I incline to think that in-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 47

dividuality is fatal and primitive, that
temperament reaches far back, but is alter-
able, and that character is more recent and
susceptible of voluntary or involuntary
modifications. Individuality is a matter of
psychology, temperament, a matter of sen-
sation or esthetics; character alone is a
matter of morals. Liberty and the use of
it count for nothing in the first two ele-
ments of our being; character is a historical
fruit, and the result of a man’s biography. —
For Schopenhauer, character is identified
with temperament just as will with passion.
In short, he simplifies too much, and looks
at man from that more elementary point of
view which is only sufficient in the case
of the animal. That spontaneity which is
vital or merely chemical he already calls
will. Analogy is not equation ; a compari-
son is not reason ; similes and parables are
not exact language. Many of Schopen-
hauer’s originalities evaporate when we
come to translate them into a more close
and precise terminology.

Later. — One has merely to turn over the
Lichtstrahlen of Herder to feel the differ-
ence between him and Schopenhauer. The
latter is full of marked features and of

48 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

observations which stand out from the page
and leave a clear and vivid impression.
Herder is much less of a writer; his ideas
are entangled in his style, and he has no
brilliant condensations, no jewels, no crys-
tals. While he proceeds by streams and
sheets of thought which have no definite or
individual outline, Schopenhauer breaks the
current of his speculation with islands, strik-
ing, original, and picturesque, which engrave
themselves in the memory. It is the same
difference as there is between Nicole and
Pascal, between Bayle and Saint-Simon.

What is the faculty which gives relief,
brilliancy, and incisiveness to thought ?
Imagination. Under its influence -expres-
sion becomes concentrated, coloured, and
strengthened, and by the power it has of
individualising all it touches, it gives life
and permanence to the material on which
it works. A writer of genius changes sand
into glass and glass into crystal, ore into
iron and iron into steel; he marks with his
own stamp every idea he gets hold of. He
borrows much from the common stock, and
gives back nothing; but even his robberies
are willingly reckoned to him as private
property. He has, as it were, carte blanche,
and public opinion allows him to take what
he will.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 49

31st August 1869. — I have finished Scho-
penhauer. My mind has been a tumult
of opposing systems — Stoicism, Quietism,
Buddhism, Christianity. Shall I never be
at peace with myself? If impersonality is
a good, why am I not consistent in the pur-
suit of it? and if it is temptation, why re-
turn to it, after having judged and conquered
it ?

Is happiness anything more than a con-
ventional fiction? The deepest reason for
my state of doubt is that the supreme end
and aim of life seems to me a mere lure and
deception. The individual is an eternal
dupe, who never obtains what he.seeks, and
who is for ever deceived by hope. My in-
stinct is in harmony with the pessimism of
Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a doubt
which never leaves me even in my moments
of religious fervour. Nature is indeed for
me a Maia; and I look at her, as it were,
with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence
remains sceptical. What, then, do I believe
in? Idonot know. And what is it I hope
for? It would be difficult to say. — Folly !
I believe in goodness, and I hope that good
will prevail. Deep within this ironical and
disappointed being of mine there is a child
hidden — a frank, sad, simple creature, who

50 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and
all heavenly superstitions. A whole millen-
nium of idylls sleeps in my heart; Iama
pseudo-sceptic, a pseudo-scoffer,

‘Borné dans sa nature, infini dans ses veeux,
L’homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient
des cieux.’

14th October 1869.— Yesterday, Wednes-
day, death of Sainte-Beuve. What a loss!

16th October 1869. — Laboremus seems to
have been the motto of Sainte-Beuve, as it
was that of Septimius Severus. He died in
harness, and up to the evening before his
last day he still wrote, overcoming the suf-
ferings of the body by the energy of the
mind. To-day, at this very moment, they
are laying him in the bosom of Mother
Earth. He refused the sacraments of the
Church ; he never belonged to any confes-
sion ; he was one of the ‘great diocese’? —
that of the independent seekers of truth,
and he allowed himself no final moment of
hypocrisy. He would have nothing to do
with any one except God only —or rather
the mysterious Isis beyond the veil. Being
unmarried, he died in the arms of his secre-
tary. He was sixty-five years old. His

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 51

power of work and of memory was immense
and intact. What is Scherer thinking about
this life and this death ?

19th October 1869. — An admirable article
by Edmond Scherer on Sainte-Beuve in
the Temps. He makes him the prince of
French critics and the last representative of
the epoch of literary taste, the future belong-
ing to the bookmakers and the chatterers,
to mediocrity and to violence. The article
breathes a certain manly melancholy, be-
fitting a funeral oration over one who was
amaster in the things of the mind. —The
fact is, that Sainte-Beuve leaves a greater
void behind him than either Béranger or
Lamartine; their greatness was already
distant, historical ; he was still helping us
to think. The true critic acts as a fulcrum
for all the world. He represents the public
judgment, that is to say the public reason,
the touchstone, the scales, the refining rod,
which tests the value of every one and the
merit of every work. Infallibility of judg-
ment is perhaps rarer than anything else,
so fine a balance of qualities does it demand
— qualities both natural and acquired, qual-
ities of mind and heart. What years of
labour, what study and comparison, are

52 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

needed to bring the critical judgment to.
maturity! Like Plato’s sage, it is only at
fifty that the critic rises to the true height
of his literary priesthood, or, to put it less
pompously, of his social function. By then
only can he hope for insight into all the
modes of being, and for mastery of all pos-
sible shades of appreciation. And Sainte-
Beuve joined to this infinitely refined
culture a prodigious memory, and an in-
credible multitude of facts and anecdotes
stored up for the service of his thought.

8th December 1869. —Everything has
chilled me this morning: the cold of the
season, the physical immobility around me,
but, above all, Hartmann’s Philosophy of the
Unconscious. This book lays down the
terrible thesis that creation is a mistake ;
being, such as it is, is not as good as non-
being, and death is better than life.

I felt the same mournful impression that
Obermann left upon me in my youth. The
black melancholy of Buddhism encom-
passed and overshadowed me. If, in fact,
it is only illusion which hides from us
the horror of existence and makes life tol-
erable to us, then existence is a snare and
life an evil. Like the Greek Annikeris, we

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 53

ought to counsel suicide, or rather with
Buddha and Schopenhauer, we ought to
labour for the radical extirpation of hope
and desire, —the causes of life and resur-
rection. Not to rise again; there is the
point, and there is the difficulty. Death is
simply a beginning again, whereas it is
annihilation that we have to aim at. Per-
sonal consciousness being the root of all
our troubles, we ought to avoid the tempta-
tion to it and the possibility of it as diaboli-
cal and abominable. — What blasphemy !
And yet it is all logical ; it is the philoso-
phy of happiness carried to its farthest
point. Epicurism must end in despair.
The philosophy of duty is less depressing.
But salvation lies in the conciliation of
duty and happiness, in the union of the
individual will with the divine will, and in
the faith that this supreme will is directed
by love.

It is as true that real happiness is
good, as that the good become better under
the purification of trial. Those who have
not suffered are still wanting in depth; but
a man who has not got happiness cannot
impart it. We can only give what we have.
Happiness, grief, gaiety, sadness, are by

54 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

nature contagious. Bring your health and
your strength to the weak and sickly, and
so you will be of use to them. Give them,
not your weakness, but your energy, —so
you will revive and lift them up. Life
alone can rekindle life. What others claim
from us is not our thirst and our hunger,
but our bread and our gourd.

The hhomatactos of Humasiie are ines
who have thought great thoughts about
her; but her masters and her idols are
those who have flattered and despised her,
those who have muzzled and massacred
her, inflamed her with fanaticism or used
her for selfish purposes. Her benefactors
are the poets, the artists, the inventors,
the apostles, and all pure hearts. Her
masters are the Cesars, the Constantines,
the Gregory VII.’s, the Innocent III.’s, the
ee the ranges

Beery civilisation is, as it were, a dream
of a thousand years, in which heaven and
earth, nature and history, appear to men
illumined by fantastic light and represent-
ing a drama which is nothing but a projec-
tion of the soul itself, influenced by some
intoxication — I was going to say hallucina-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 55

tion—or other. Those who are widest
awake still see the real world across the
dominant illusion of their race or time.
And the reason is that the deceiving light
starts from our own mind: the light is our
religion. Everything changes with it. It
is religion which gives to our kaleidoscope,
if not the material of the figures, at least
their colour, their light and shade, and gen-
eral aspect. Every religion makes men see
‘the world and humanity under a special
light ; it is a mode of apperception, which
can only be scientifically handled when
we have cast it aside, and can only be
judged when we have replaced it by a
better.

23d February 1870.— There is in man an
instinct of revolt, an enemy of all law, a
rebel which will stoop to no yoke, not even
that of reason, duty, and wisdom. This
element in us is the root of all sin —das
radicale Bose of Kant. The independence
which is the condition of individuality is
at the same time the eternal temptation of
the individual. That which makes us be-
ings makes us also'sinners.

Sin is, then, in our very marrow, it cir-
culates in us like the blood in our veins, it

56 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

is mingled with all our substance.? Or
rather I am wrong: temptation is our
natural state, but sin is not necessary.
Sin consists in the voluntary confusion of
the independence which is good with the
independence which is bad ; it is caused by
the half-indulgence granted to a first
sophism. We shut our eyes to the begin-
nings of evil because they are small, and in
this weakness is contained the germ of
’ our defeat. Principiis obsta — this maxim
dutifully followed would preserve us from
almost all our catastrophes.

We will have no other master but our
caprice —that is to say, our evil self will
have no God, and the foundation of our
nature is seditious, impious, insolent, re-
fractory, opposed to and contemptuous of
all that tries to rule it, and therefore con-
trary to order, ungovernable and negative.
It is this foundation which Christianity
ealls the natural man. But the savage
which is within us, and constitutes the
primitive stuff of us, must be disciplined
and civilised in order to produce .a man.
And the man must be patiently cultivated
to produce a wise man, and the wise man
mast be tested and tried if he is to become
righteous. And the righteous man must

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 57

have substituted the will of God for his
individual will, if he is to become a saint.
And this new man, this regenerate being,
is the spiritual man, the heavenly man,
of which the Vedas speak as well as the
Gospel, and the Magi as well as the Neo-
Platonists.

17th March 1870.— This morning the
music of a brass band which had stopped
under my windows moved me almost to
tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostal-
gic power over me; it set me dreaming of
another world, of infinite passion and su-
preme happiness. Such impressions are
the echoes of Paradise in the soul ; memo-
ries of ideal spheres, whose sad sweetness
ravishes and intoxicates the heart. O
Plato! O Pythagoras ! ages ago you heard
these harmonies, — surprised these mo-
ments of inward ecstasy,—knew these
divine transports! If music thus carries
us to heaven, it is because music is har-
mony, harmony is perfection, perfection is
our dream, and our dream is heaven. This
world of quarrels and of bitterness, of self-
ishness, ugliness, and misery, makes us
long involuntarily for the eternal peace, for
the adoration which has no limits, and the

58 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

love which has no end. It is not so much
the infinite as the beautiful that we yearn
for. It is not being, or the limits of being,
which weigh upon us; it is evil, in us and
without us. It is not at all necessary to be
great, so long as we are in harmony with
the order of the universe. Moral ambition
has no pride ; it only desires to fill its place,
and make its note duly heard in the univer-
sal concert of the God of love.

30th March 1870.— Certainly, Nature is
unjust and shameless, without probity, and
without faith. Her only alternatives are
gratuitous favour or mad aversion, and her
only way of redressing an injustice is to
commit another. The happiness of the few
is expiated by the misery of the greater
number. — It is useless to accuse a blind
force. —

The human conscience, however, revolts
against this law of nature, and to satisfy
its own instinct of justice it has imagined
two hypotheses, out of which it has made
for itself a religion, —the idea of an indi-
vidual providence, and the hypothesis of
another life.

In these we have a protest against nature,
which is thus declared immoral and scanda-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 59

lous to the moral sense. Man believes in
good, and that he may ground himself on
justice he maintains that the injustice all
around him is but an appearance, a mys-
tery, a cheat, and that justice will be done.
Fiat justitia, pereat mundus !

It is a great act of faith. And since
humanity has not made itself, this protest
has some chance of expressing a truth. If
there is conflict between the natural world
and the moral world, between reality and
conscience, conscience must be right.

It is by no means necessary that the
universe should exist, but it is necessary
that justice should be done, and atheism
is bound to explain the fixed obstinacy of
conscience on this point. Nature is not
just ; we are the products of nature: why
are we always claiming and prophesying
justice ? why does the effect rise up against
its cause? It is a singular phenomenon.
Does the protest come from any puerile
blindness of human vanity ? No, it is the
deepest cry of our being, and it is for the
honour of God that the cry is uttered.
Heaven and earth may pass away, but
good ought to be, and injustice ought not
to be. Such is the creed of the human race,
Nature will be conquered by spirit: the
eternal will triumph over time.

60 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

1st April 1870. —I am inclined to believe
that for a woman love is the supreme au-
thority —that which judges the rest and
decides what is good or evil. For a man,
love is subordinate to right. It is a great
passion, but it is not the source of order,
the synonym of reason, the criterion of
excellence. It would seem, then, that a
woman places her ideal in the perfection of
love, and a man in the perfection of justice.
It was in this sense that St. Paul was able
to say, ‘The woman is the glory of the
man, and the man is the glory of God.’
Thus the woman who absorbs herself in the
object of her love is, so to speak, in the line
of nature: she is truly woman, she realises
her fundamental type. On the contrary,
the man who should make life consist in
conjugal adoration, and who should imag-
ine that he has lived sufficiently when he
has made himself the priest of a beloved
woman, such a one is but half a man; he
is despised by the world, and perhaps se-
cretly disdained by women themselves.
The woman who loves truly seeks to merge
her own individuality in that of the man
she loves. She desires that her love should
make him greater, stronger, more mascu-
line, and more active. Thus each sex plays

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 61

its appointed part: the woman is first des-
tined for man, and man is destined for
society. Woman owes herself to one, man
owes himself to all; and each obtains
peace and happiness only when he or she
has recognised this law and accepted this
balance of things. The same thing may be
a good in the woman and an evil in the
man, may be strength in her, weakness in
him.

There is then a feminine and a masculine
morality, — preparatory chapters, as it were,
to a general human morality. Below the
virtue which is evangelical and sexless,
there is a virtue of sex. And this virtue of
sex is the occasion of mutual teaching, for
each of the two incarnations of virtue
makes it its business to convert the other,
the first preaching love in the ears of jus-

tice, the second justice in the ears of love.
And so there is produced an oscillation and
an average which represent a social state,
an epoch, sometimes a whole civilisation.

Such at least is our European idea of the
harmony of the sexes in a graduated order
of functions. America is on the road to
revolutionise this ideal by the introduction
of the democratic principle of the equality
of individuals in a general equality of func-

62 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

tions. Only, when there is nothing left
but a multitude of equal individualities,
neither young nor old, neither men nor
women, neither benefited nor benefactors,
— all social difference will turn upon money.
The whole hierarchy will rest upon the dol-
lar, and the most brutal, the most hideous,
the most inhuman of inequalities will be the
fruit of the passion for equality. Whata
result! Plutolatry — the worship of wealth,
the madness of gold — to it will be confided
the task of chastising a false principle and
its followers. And plutocracy will be in its
turn executed by equality. It would be a
strange end for it, if Anglo-Saxon individ-
ualism were ultimately swallowed up in
Latin socialism.

It is my prayer that the discovery of an
equilibrium between the two principles may
be made in time, before the social war, with
all its terror and ruin, overtakes us. But
it is scarcely likely. The masses are always
ignorant and limited, and only advance by
a succession of contrary errors. They reach
good only by the exhaustion of evil. They
discover the way out, only after having run
their heads against all other possible issues.

15th April 1870. — Cruciyixion! That is

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 63

the word we have to meditate to-day. Is
it not Good Friday ?

To curse grief is easier than to bless it,
but to do so is to fall back into the point of
view of the earthly, the carnal, the natural
man. By what has Christianity subdued
the world if not by the apotheosis of grief,
by its marvellous transmutation of suffering
into triumph, of the crown of thorns into
the crown of glory, and of a gibbet into
a symbol of salvation? What does the
apotheosis of the Cross mean, if not the
death of death, the defeat of sin, the beati-
fication of martyrdom, the raising to the
skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of
pain ? —‘O Death, where is thy sting? O
Grave, where is thy victory?’ — By long
brooding over this theme—the agony of
the just, peace in the midst of agony, and
the heavenly beauty of such peace —hu-
manity came to understand that a new
religion was born, —a new mode, that is to
say, of explaining life and of understand-
ing suffering.

Suffering was a curse from which man
fied; now it becomes a purification of the
soul, a sacred trial sent by Eternal Love, a
divine dispensation meant to sanctify and
ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a

64 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

strange initiation into happiness. O power
of belief! All remains the same, and yet all
is changed. A new certitude arises to deny
the apparent and the tangible; it pierces
through the mystery of things, it places an
invisible Father behind visible nature, it
shows us joy shining through tears, and
makes of pain the beginning of joy.

And so, for those who have believed, the
tomb becomes heaven, and on the funeral
pyre of life they sing the hosanna of im-
mortality ; a sacred madness has renewed
the face of the world for them, and when
they wish to explain what they feel, their
ecstasy makes them incomprehensible ; they
speak with tongues. A wild intoxication of
self-sacrifice, contempt for death, the thirst
for eternity, the delirium of love, — these
are what the unalterable gentleness of the
Crucified has had power to bring forth.
By his pardon of his executioners, and by
that unconquerable sense in him of an
indissoluble union with God, Jesus, on his
cross, kindled an inextinguishable fire and
revolutionised the world. He proclaimed
and realised salvation by faith in the infinite
mercy, and in the pardon granted to simple
repentance. By his saying, ‘ There is more
joy in heaven over one sinner that repent-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 65

eth than over ninety and nine just persons
who need no repentance,’ he made humility
the gate of entrance into Paradise.

Crucify the rebellious self, mortify your-
self wholly, give up all to God, and the
peace which is not of this world will de-
scend upon you. For eighteen centuries
no grander word has been spoken; and
although humanity is for ever seeking after
a more exact and complete application of
justice, yet her secret faith is not in justice
but in pardon, for pardon alone conciliates
the spotless purity of perfection with the
infinite pity due to weakness — that is to
say, it alone preserves and defends the idea
of holiness, while it allows full scope to
that of love. The Gospel proclaims the
ineffable consolation, the good news, which
disarms all earthly griefs, and robs even
death of its terrors—the news of irrevoca-
ble pardon, that is to say, of eternal life.
The Cross is the guarantee of the Gospel.
Therefore it has been its standard.

7th May 1870.— The faith which clings
to its idols and resists all innovation is a
retarding and conservative force; but it is
the property of all religion to serve as a
curb to our lawless passion for freedom,

66 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

and to steady and quiet our restlessness of
temper. Curiosity is the expansive force,
which, if it were allowed an unchecked
action upon us, would disperse and volati-
lise us ; belief represents the force of gravi-
tation and cohesion, which makes separate
bodies and individuals of us. Society lives
by faith, develops by science. Its basis,
then, is the mysterious, the unknown, the
intangible, — religion, — while the ferment-
ing principle in it is the desire of knowledge.
Its permanent substance is the uncompre-
hended or the divine ; its changing form is
the result of its intellectual labour. The
unconscious adhesions, the confused intui-
tions, the obscure presentiments, which
decide the first faith of a people, are then
of capital importance in its history. All
history moves between the religion which
is the genial, instinctive, and fundamental
philosophy of a race, and the philosophy
which is the ultimate religion, —the clear
perception, that is to say, of those prin-
ciples which have engendered the whole
spiritual development of humanity.

It is always the same thing which is, which
was, and which will be; but this thing —
the absolute — betrays with more or less
transparency and profundity the law of its

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 67

life and of its metamorphoses. In its fixed
aspect it is called God ; in its mobile aspect
the world or nature. God is present in
nature, but nature is not God; there is a
nature in God, but it is not God Himself.
I am neither for immanence nor for tran-
scendence taken alone.

9th May 1870. — Disraeli, in his new
novel, Lothair, shows that the two great
forces of the present are Revolution and
Catholicism, and that the free nations are
lost if either of these two forces triumphs.
It is exactly my own idea. Only, while in
France, in Belgium, in Italy, and in all
Catholic societies, it is only by checking
one of these forces by the other that the
State and civilisation can be maintained,
the Protestant countries are better off; in
them there is a third force, a middle faith
between the two other idolatries, which
enables them to regard liberty not as a
neutralisation of two contraries, but as a
moral reality, self-subsistent, and possess-
ing its own centre of gravity and motive
- force. In the Catholic world religion and
liberty exclude each other. In the Protes-
tant. world they accept each other, so that
in the second case there is a smaller waste
of force.

68 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Liberty is the lay, the philosophical prin-
ciple. It expresses the juridical and social
aspiration of the race. But as there is no
society possible without regulation, without
control, without limitations on individual
liberty, above all without moral limitations,
the peoples which are legally the freest do
well to take their religious consciousness
for check and ballast. In mixed States,
Catholic or freethinking, the limit of action,
being a merely penal one, invites incessant
contravention.

The puerility of the freethinkers consists
in believing that a free society can main-
tain itself and keep itself together without
a common faith, without a religious preju-
dice of some kind. Where lies the will of
God? Is it the common reason which
expresses it, or rather, are a clergy or a
church the depositories of it? So long as
the response is ambiguous and equivocal in
- the eyes of half or the majority of con-
sciences —and this is the case in all Cath-
olic States — public peace is impossible,
and public law is insecure. If there is a
God, we must have Him on our side, and
if there is not a God, it would be necessary
first of all to convert everybody to the same
idea of the lawful and the useful, to recon-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 69

stitute, that is to say, a lay religion, before
anything politically solid could be built.

Liberalism is merely feeding upon ab-
stractions, when it persuades itself that
liberty is possible without free individuals,
and when it will not recognise that liberty
in the individual is the fruit of a foregoing
education, a moral education, which pre-
supposes a liberating religion. To preach
liberalism to a population jesuitised by
education, is to press the pleasures of danc-
ing upon a man who has lost a leg. How
is it possible for a child who has never
been out of swaddling clothes to walk ?
How can the abdication of individual con-
science lead to the government of individual
conscience ? To be free, is to guide one-
self, to have attained one’s majority, to be
emancipated, master of one’s actions, and
judge of good and evil; but Ultramontane
Catholicism never emancipates its disciples,
who are bound to admit, to believe, and to
obey, as they are told, because they are
minors in perpetuity, and the clergy alone
possess the law of right, the secret of jus-
tice, and the measure of truth. This is
what men are landed in by the idea of an
exterior revelation, cleverly made use of by
a patient priesthood.

70 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

But what astonishes me is the short-sight
of the statesmen of the south, who do not
see that the question of questions is the
religious question, and even now do not
recognise that a liberal State is wholly
incompatible with an anti-liberal religion,
and almost equally incompatible with the
absence of religion. They confound acci-
dental conquests and precarious progress
with lasting results.

There is some probability that all this
noise which is made nowadays about liberty
may end in the suppression of liberty ; it is
plain that the International, the irreconcil-
ables, and the ultramontanes, are, all three
of them, aiming at absolutism, at dictatorial
omnipotence. Happily they are not one
but many, and it will not be difficult to
turn them against each other.

If liberty is to be saved, it will not be by
the doubters, the men of science, or the
materialists ; it will be by religious convic-
tion, by the faith of individuals who believe
that God wills man to be free but also pure ;
it will be by the seekers after holiness, by
those old-fashioned pious persons who speak
of immortality and eternal life, and prefer
the soul to the whole world ; it will be by
the enfranchised children of the ancient
faith of the human race.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 71

5th June 1870. — The efficacy of religion
lies precisely in that which is not rational,
philosophic, nor eternal ; its efficacy lies in
the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraor-
dinary. ‘Thus religion attracts more devo-
tion in proportion as it demands more faith
—that is to say, as it becomes more incred-
ible to the profane mind. The philosopher
aspires to explain away all mysteries, to
dissolve them into light. It is mystery, on
the other hand, which the religious instinct
demands and pursues: it is mystery which
constitutes the essence of worship, the
power of proselytism. When the cross be-
came the ‘foolishness’ of the cross, it took
possession of the masses. And in our own
day, those who wish to get rid of the super-
natural, to enlighten religion, to economise
faith, find themselves deserted, like poets
who should declaim against poetry, or
women who should decry love. Faith con-
sists in the acceptance of the incompre-
hensible, and even in the pursuit of the
impossible, and is self-intoxicated with its
own sacrifices, its own repeated extrava-
gances.

It is the forgetfulness of this psychologi-
cal law which stultifies the so-called liberal
Christianity. It is the realisation of it

72 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

which constitutes the strength of Catholi.
cism.

Apparently no positive religion can sur-
vive the supernatural element which is the
reason for its existence. Natural religion
seems to be the tomb of all historic cults.
All concrete religions die eventually in the
pure air of philosophy. So long then as
the life of nations is in need of religion as
a motive and sanction of morality, as food
for faith, hope, and charity, so long will the
masses turn away from pure reason and
naked truth, so long will they adore mys-
tery, so long —and rightly so — will they
rest in faith, the only region where the
ideal presents itself to them in an attractive
form.

9th June 1870.— At bottom, everything
depends upon the presence or absence of
one single element in the soul—hope. All
the activity of man, all his efforts and all
his enterprises, presuppose a hope in him
of attaining an end. Once kill this hope
and his movements become senseless, spas-
modic, and convulsive, like those of some
one falling from a height. To struggle with
the inevitable has something childish in it.
To implore the law of gravitation to sus-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 73

pend its action would no doubt be a gro-
tesque prayer. Very well! but when a
man loses faith in the efficacy of his efforts,
when he says to himself, ‘ You are incapa-
ble of realising your ideal; happiness is a
chimera, progress is an illusion, the passion
for perfection is a snare; and supposing all
your ambitions were gratified, everything
would still be vanity,’ then he comes to see
that a little blindness is necessary if life is
to be carried on, and that illusion is the
universal spring of movement.’ Complete
disillusion would mean absolute immobility.
He who has deciphered the secret and read
the riddle of finite life escapes from the
great wheel of existence ; he has left the
world of the living —he is already dead.
Is this the meaning of the old belief that to
raise the veil of Isis or to behold God face
to face brought destruction upon the rash
mortal who attempted it? Egypt and
Judea had recorded the fact, Buddha gave
the key to it; the individual life is a noth-
ing ignorant of itself, and as soon as this
nothing knows itself, individual life is abol-
ished in principle. For as soon as the illu-
sion vanishes, Nothingness resumes its
eternal sway, the suffering of life is over,
error has disappeared, time and form have

74 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

ceased to be for this enfranchised indiyidu-
ality ; the coloured air-bubble has burst in
the infinite space, and the misery of thought
has sunk to rest in the changeless repose of
all-embracing Nothing. The absolute, if it
were spirit, would still be activity, and it is
activity, the daughter of desire, which is
incompatible with the absolute. The abso-
lute, then, must be the zero of all deter-
mination, and the only manner of being
suited to it is Non-being.

2d July 1870.— One of the vices of France
is the frivolity which substitutes public con-
ventions for truth, and absolutely ignores
personal dignity and the majesty of con-
science. The French are ignorant of the
A B C of individual liberty, and still show
an essentially catholic intolerance towards
the ideas which have not attained univer-
sality or the adhesion of the majority. The
nation is an army which can bring to bear
mass, number, and force, but not an assem-
bly of free men in which each individual
depends for his value on himself. The
eminent Frenchman depends upon others
for his value ; if he possess stripe, cross,
scarf, sword, or robe, —in a word, function
and decoration,—then he is held to be

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 75

something; and he feels himself somebody.
It is the symbol which establishes his merit ;
it is the public which raises him from noth-
ing, as the Sultan creates his viziers. These
highly-trained and social races have an an-
tipathy for individual independence ; every-
thing with them must be founded upon
authority military, civil, or religious, and
God Himself is non-existent until He has
been established by decree. Their funda-
mental dogma is that social omnipotence
which treats the pretension of truth to be
true without any official stamp, as a mere
usurpation and sacrilege, and scouts the
claim of the individual to possess either a
separate conviction or a personal value.

20th July 1870 (Bellalpe). — A marvel-
lous day. The panorama before me is of a
grandiose splendour; it is a symphony of
mountains, a cantata of sunny Alps.

Iam dazzled and oppressed by it. The
feeling uppermost is one of delight in being
able to admire, of joy, that is to say, in a
recovered power of contemplation which is
the result of physical relief, in being able
at last to forget myself and surrender my-
self to things, as befits a man in my state
of health. Gratitude is mingled with en-

76 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

thusiasm. I have just spent two hours of
continuous delight at the foot of the Spar-
renhorn, the peak behind us. A flood of
sensations overpowered me. I could only
look, feel, dream, and think.

Later. — Ascent of the Sparrenhorn. The
peak of it is not very easy to climb, because
of the masses of loose stones and the steep-
ness of the path, which runs between two
abysses. But how great is one’s reward !

The view embraces the whole series of
the Valais Alps from the Furka to the
Combin; and even beyond the Furka one
sees a few peaks of the Ticino and the
Rhaetian Alps; while if you turn you see
behind you a whole Polar world of snow-
fields and glaciers forming the southern
side of the enormous Bernese group of the
Finsteraarhorn, the Ménch, and the Jung-
frau. The near representative of the group
is the Aletschhorn, whence diverge like so
many ribbons the different Aletsch glaciers
which wind about the peak from which I
saw them. I could study the different
zones, one above another, — fields, woods,
grassy Alps, bare rock and snow, and the
principal types of mountain; the pagoda-
shaped Mischabel, with its four arétes as

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 77

flying buttresses and its staff of nine clus-
tered peaks ; the cupola of the Fletschhorn,
the dome of Monte Rosa, the pyramid of
the Weisshorn, the obelisk of the Cervin.

Round me fluttered a multitude of butter-
flies and brilliant green-backed flies; but
nothing grew except a few lichens. The
deadness and emptiness of the upper Aletsch
glacier, like some vast white street, called
up the image of an icy Pompeii. All around
boundless silence. On my way back I
noticed some effects of sunshine, —the
close elastic mountain grass, starred with
gentian, forget-me-not, and anemones, the
mountain cattle standing out against the
sky, the rocks just piercing the soil, various
circular dips in the mountain side, stone
waves petrified thousands of thousands of
years ago, the undulating ground, the ten-
der quiet of the evening: and I invoked the
soul of the mountains and the spirit of the
heights !

22d July 1870 (Bellalpe).—The sky,
which was misty and overcast this morning,
has become perfectly blue again, and the
giants of the Valais are bathed in tranquil
light.

Whence this solemn melancholy which
oppresses and pursues me? I have just

78 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

read a series of scientific books (Bronn on
the Laws of Paleontology, Karl Ritter on
the Law of Geographical Forms). Are
they the cause of this depression? or is
it the majesty of this immense landscape,
the splendour of this setting sun, which
brings the tears to my eyes ?

‘Créature d’un jour qui t’agites une heure,’

what weighs upon thee —I know it well —
is the sense of thine utter nothingness!...
The names of great men hover before my
eyes like a secret reproach, and this grand
impassive nature tells me that to-morrow I
shall have disappeared, butterfly that I am,
without having lived. Or perhaps it is the
breath of eternal things which stirs in me
the shudder of Job. What is man— this
weed which a sunbeam withers ? What is
our life in the infinite abyss? I feel a sort
of sacred terror, not only for myself, but
for my race, for all that is mortal. Like
Buddha, I feel the great wheel turning, —
the wheel of universal illusion, — and the
dumb stupor which enwraps me is full of
anguish. Isis lifts the corner of her veil,
and he who perceives the great mystery
beneath is struck with giddiness, I can
scarcely breathe. It seems to me that I

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 79

am hanging by a thread above the fathom-
less abyss of destiny. Is this the Infinite
face to face, an intuition of the last great
death ?

‘Créature d’un jour qui t’agites une heure,
Ton &me est immortelle et tes pleurs vont
finir.’

Finir ? When depths of ineffable desire
are opening in the heart, as vast, as yawn-
ing as the immensity which surrounds us ?
Genius, self-devotion, love, — all these cray-
ings quicken into life and torture me at
once. Like the shipwrecked sailor about
to sink under the waves, I am conscious of
a mad clinging to life, and at the same time
of a rush of despair and repentance, which
forces from me a cry for pardon. And
then all this hidden agony dissolves in
wearied submission. ‘Resign yourself to
the inevitable! Shroud away out of sight
the flattering delusions of youth! Live
and die in the shade! Like the insects
humming in the darkness, offer up your
evening prayer. Be content to fade out of
life without a murmur whenever the Mas-
ter of life shall breathe upon your tiny
flame! It is out of myriads of unknown
lives that every clod of earth is built up.

80 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

The infusoria do not count until they are
millions upon millions. Accept your noth-
ingness.’ Amen!

But there is no peace except in order, in
law. Am I in order? Alas, no! My
changeable and restless nature will torment
me to the end. I shall never see plainly
what I ought todo. The love of the better
will have stood between me and the good.
Yearning for the ideal will have lost me
reality. Vague aspiration and undefined
desire will have been enough to make my
talents useless, and to neutralise my pow-
ers. Unproductive nature that I am, tort-
ured by the belief that production was
required of me, may not my very remorse
be a mistake and a superfluity ?

Scherer’s phrase comes back to me, ‘ We
must accept ourselves as we are”

8th September 1870 (Zurich). — All the
exiles are returning to Paris — Edgar Qui-
net, Louis Blanc, Victor Hugo. By the
help of their united experience will they
succeed in maintaining the Republic? It
is to be hoped so. But the past makes it
lawful to doubt. While the Republic is in
reality a fruit, the French look upon it as
a seed-sowing. Elsewhere such a form

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 81

of government presupposes free men; in
France it is and must be an instrument of
instruction and protection. France has
once more placed sovereignty in the hands
of universal suffrage, as though the multi-
tude were already enlightened, judicious,
and reasonable, and now her task is to train
and discipline the force which, by a fiction,
is master.

The ambition of France is set upon self-
government, but her capacity for it has still
to be proved. For eighty years she has
confounded revolution with liberty; will
she now give proof of amendment and of
wisdom ? Such a change is not impossible.
Let us wait for it with sympathy, but also
with caution.

12th September 1870 (Basle).— The old
Rhine is murmuring under my window.
The wide gray stream rolls its great waves
along and breaks against the arches of the
bridge, just as it did ten years or twenty
years ago; the red cathedral shoots its
arrow-like spires towards heaven; the ivy
on the terraces which fringe the left bank
of the Rhine hangs over the walls like a
green mantle; the indefatigable ferry-boat
goes and comes as it did of yore; ina word,

82 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

things seem to be eternal, while man’s hair
turns gray and his heart grows old. I
came here first as a student, then as a pro-
fessor. Now I return to it at the down-
ward turn of middle age, and nothing in
the landscape has changed except myself.

The melancholy of memory may be com-
monplace and puerile, —all the same it is
true, it is inexhaustible, and the poets of all
times have been open to its attacks,

At bottom, what is individual life? A
variation of an eternal theme — to be born,
to live, to feel, to hope, to love, to suffer, to
weep, to die. Some would add to these,
to grow rich, to think, to conquer; but in
fact, whatever frantic efforts one may make,
however one may strain and excite oneself,
one can but cause a greater or-slighter
undulation in the line of one’s destiny.
Supposing a man renders the series of
fundamental phenomena a little more evi-
dent to others or a little more distinct to
himself, what does it matter? The whole
is still nothing but a fluttering of the infi-
nitely little, the insignificant repetition of
an invariable theme. In truth, whether
the individual exists or no, the difference is
so absolutely imperceptible in the whole of
things that every complaint and every de-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 83

sire is ridiculous. Humanity in its entirety
is but a flash in the duration of the planet,
and the planet may return to the gaseous
state without the sun’s feeling it even for a
second. The individual is the infinitesimal
of nothing.

What, then, is nature? Nature is Maia
— that is to say, an incessant, fugitive, in-
different series of phenomena, the manifes-
tation of all possibilities, the inexhaustible
play of all combinations.

And is Maia all the while performing for
the amusement of somebody, of some spec-
tator— Brahma? Or is Brahma working
out some serious and unselfish end? From
the theistic point of view, is it the purpose
of God to make souls, to augment the sum
of good and wisdom by the multiplication of
Himself in free beings — facets which may
flash back to Him His own holiness and
beauty ? This conception is far more at-
tractive to the heart. But is it more true ?
The moral consciousness affirms it. If man
is capable of conceiving goodness, the gen-
eral principle of things, which cannot be
inferior to man, must be good. The phi-
losophy of labour, of duty, of effort, is
surely superior to that of phenomena,
chance, and universal indifference. If so,

84 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

the whimsical Maia would be subordinate
to Brahma, the eternal thought, and Brahma
would be in his turn subordinate to a holy
God.

25th October 1870 (Geneva). —‘ Each
function to the most worthy :’ this maxim
governs all constitutions, and serves to test
them. Democracy is not forbidden to
apply it, but democracy rarely does apply
it, because she holds, for example, that the
most worthy man is the man who pleases
her, whereas he who pleases her is not
always the most worthy, and because she
supposes that reason guides the masses,
whereas in reality they are most commonly
led by passion. And in the end every faise-
hood has to be expiated, for truth always
takes its revenge.

Alas, whatever one may say or do, wis-
dom, justice, reason, and goodness will
never be anything more than special cases
and the heritage of a few elect souls. Moral
and intellectual harmony, excellence in all
its forms, will always be a rarity of great
price, an isolated chef d’wuvre. All that
can be expected from the most perfect
institutions is that they should make it pos-
~ sible for individual excellence to develop

.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 85

itself, not that they should produce the
excellent individual. Virtue and genius,
grace and beauty, will always constitute a
noblesse such as no form of government can
manufacture. It is of no use, therefore, to
excite oneself for or against revolutions
which have only an importance of the
second order—an importance which I do
not wish either to diminish or to ignore,
but an importance which, after all, is mostly
negative. The political life is but the
means of the true life.

26th October 1870.—Sirocco. A bluish
sky. The leafy crowns of the trees have
dropped at their feet; the finger of winter
has touched them. The errand-woman has
just brought me my letters. Poor little
woman, what a life! She spends her nights
in going backwards and forwards from her
invalid husband to her sister, who is scarcely
less helpless, and her days are passed in ©
labour. Resigned and indefatigable, she
goes on without complaining, till she drops.

Lives such as hers prove something: that
the true ignorance is moral ignorance, that
labour and suffering are the lot of all men,
and that classification according to a greater
or less degree of folly is inferior to that

86 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

which proceeds according to a greater or
less degree of virtue. The kingdom of God
belongs not to the most enlightened but to
the best; and the best man is the most
unselfish man. Humble, constant, volun-
tary self-sacrifice, — this is what constitutes
the true dignity of man. And therefore is
it written, ‘ The last shall be first.’ Society
rests upon conscience and not upon science.
Civilisation is first and foremost a moral
thing. Without honesty, without respect
for law, without the worship of duty, with-
out the love of one’s neighbour, —in a word,
without virtue, — the whole is menaced and
falls into decay, and neither letters nor art,
neither luxury nor industry, nor rhetoric,
nor the policeman, nor the custom-house offi-
cer, can maintain erect and whole an edifice
of which the foundations are unsound.

A State founded upon interest alone and
cemented by fear is an ignoble and unsafe
construction. The ultimate ground upon
which every civilisation rests is the average
morality of the masses, and a sufficient
amount of practical righteousness.. Duty
is what upholds all. So that those who
humbly and unobtrusively fulfil it, and set
a good example thereby, are the salvation
and the sustenance of this brilliant world,

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 87

which knows nothing about them. Ten
righteous men would have saved Sodom,
but thousands and thousands of good
homely folk are needed to preserve a people
from corruption and decay.

If ignorance and passion are the foes of
popular morality, it must be confessed that
moral indifference is the malady of the cul-
tivated classes. The modern separation of
enlightenment and virtue, of thought and
conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy
from the honest and vulgar crowd, is the
greatest danger that can threaten liberty.
When any society produces an increasing
number of literary exquisites, of satirists,
sceptics, and beaux esprits, some chemical
disorganisation of fabric may be inferred.
Take, for example, the century of Augus-
tus and that of Louis XV. Our cynics and
railers are mere egotists, who stand aloof
from the common duty, and in their indo-
lent remoteness are of no service to society
against any ill which may attack it. Their
cultivation consists in having got rid of feel-
ing. And thus they fall farther and farther
away from true humanity, and approach
nearer to the demoniacal nature. What
was it that Mephistopheles lacked? Not
intelligence certainly, but goodness.

88 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

28th October 1870.—It is strange to see
how completely justice is forgotten in the
presence of great international struggles.
Even the great majority of the spectators are
no longer capable of judging except as their
own personal tastes, dislikes, fears, desires,
interests, or passions may dictate, — that is
to say, their judgment is not a judgment at
all. How many people are capable of de-
livering a fair verdict on the struggle now
going on? Very few! This horror of
equity, this antipathy to justice, this rage
against a merciful neutrality, represents a
kind of eruption of animal passion in man,
a blind fierce passion, which is absurd
enough to call itself a reason, whereas it is
nothing but a force.

16th November 1870. — We are struck by
something bewildering and ineffable when
we look down into the depths of an abyss ;
and every soul is an abyss, a mystery of
love and pity. A sort of sacred emotion
descends upon me whenever I penetrate
the recesses of this sanctuary of man, and
hear the gentle murmur of the prayers,
hymns, and supplications which rise from
the hidden depths of the heart. These
involuntary confidences fill me with a

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 89

tender piety and a religious awe and shy-
ness. The whole experience seems to me
as wonderful as poetry, and divine with
the divineness of birth and dawn. Speech
fails me, I bow myself and adore. And,
whenever I am able, I strive also to console
and fortify.

6th December 1870. — Dauer im Wechsel
— ‘Persistence in change.’ This title of
a poem by Goethe is the summing up of
nature. Everything changes, but with such
unequal rapidity that one existence appears
eternal to another. A geological age, for
instance, compared to the duration of any
living being, the duration of a planet com-
pared to a geological age, appear eternities,
— our life, too, compared to the thousand
impressions which pass across us in an
hour. Wherever one looks, one feels one-
self overwhelmed by the infinity of infinites.
The universe, seriously studied, rouses one’s
terror. Everything seems so relative that
it is scarcely possible to distinguish whether

anything has a real value.
_ Where is the fixed point in this boundless
and bottomless gulf? Must it not be that
Wisich perceives the relations of things, —
in other words, thought, infinite thought ?

go AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

The perception of ourselves within the
infinite thought, the realisation of ourselves
in God, self-acceptance in Him, the harmony
of our will with His, —in a word, religion,
— here alone is firm ground. Whether this
thought be free or necessary, happiness lies
in identifying oneself with it. Both the
Stoic and the Christian surrender them-
selves to the Being of beings, which the
one calls sovereign wisdom and the other
sovereign goodness. St. John says, ‘ God
is Light,’ ‘God is Love.’ The Brahmin
says, ‘God is the inexhaustible fount of
poetry.’ Let us say, ‘God is Perfection.’
And man? Man, for all his inexpressible
insignificance and frailty, may still appre-
hend the idea of perfection, may help
forward the supreme will, and die with
Hosanna on his lips !

All teaching depends upon a certain pre-
sentiment and preparation in the taught;
we can only teach others profitably what
they already virtually know; we can only
give them what they had already. This
principle of education is also a law of
history. Nations can only be developed on
the lines of their tendencies and aptitudes.
Try them on any other and they are re-
bellious and incapable of improvement.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. gI

By despising himself too much a man
comes to be worthy of his own contempt.

Its way of suffering is the witness which
a soul bears to itself.

The beautiful is superior to the sublime be-
cause it lasts and does not satiate, while the
sublime is Seamale, omc and violent.

4th weeny 1871. — Perpetual effort is
the characteristic of modern morality. A
painful process has taken the place of the
old harmony, the old equilibrium, the old
joy and fulness of being. We are all so
many fauns, satyrs, or Silenuses, aspiring
to become angels; so many deformities
labouring for our own embellishment ; so
many clumsy chrysalises each working
painfully towards the development of the
butterfly within him. Our ideal is no
longer a serene beauty of soul; it is the
agony of Laocoon struggling with the hydra
of evil. The lot is cast irrevocably. There
are no more happy whole-natured men
among us, nothing but so many candidates
for heaven, galley-slaves on earth.

‘Nous ramous notre vie en attendant le port.’

g2 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Moliére said that reasoning banished
reason. It is possible also that the progress
towards perfection we are so proud of is
only a pretentious imperfection. Duty
seems now to be more negative than posi-
tive; it means lessening evil rather than
actual good; it is a generous discontent,
but not happiness; it is an incessant pur-
suit of an unattainable goal, 4 noble mad-
ness, but not reason; it is home-sickness
for the impossible, — pathetic and pitiful,
but still not wisdom.

The being which has attained harmony,
and every being may attain it, has found
its place in the order of the universe, and
represents the divine thought at least as
clearly as a flower or a solar system.
Harmony seeks nothing outside itself. It
is what it ought to be; it is the expression
of right, order, law, and truth; it is greater
than time, and represents eternity.

6th February 1871.—I am reading Juste
Olivier’s Chansons du Soir over again, and
all the melancholy of the poet seems to pass
into my veins. It is the revelation of a
complete existence, and of a whole world
of melancholy reverie.

How much character there is in Musette,

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 93

the Chanson de Il’ Alouette, the Chant du
Retour, and the Gaité, and how much fresh-
ness in Lina, and ‘A ma fille!’ But the
best pieces of all are Au dela, Homuncu-
lus, La Trompeuse, and especially Frére
Jacques, its author’s masterpiece. To
these may be added the Marionettes and the
national song, Helvétie. Serious purpose
and intention disguised in gentle gaiety
and childlike badinage, feeling hiding itself
under a smile of satire, a resigned and pen-
sive wisdom expressing itself in rustic round
or ballad, the power of suggesting every-
thing in a nothing, —these are the points
in which the Vaudois poet triumphs. On
the reader’s side there is emotion and sur-
prise, and on the author’s a sort of pleasant
slyness which seems to delight in playing
tricks upon you, only tricks of the most
dainty and brilliant kind. Juste Olivier
has the passion we might imagine a fairy
to have for delicate mystification. He
hides his gifts. He promises nothing and
gives a great deal. His generosity, which
is prodigal, has a surly air; his simplicity
is really subtlety ; his malice pure tender-
ness; and his whole talent is, as it were,
the fine flower of the Vaudois mind in its
sweetest and dreamiest form.

94 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

10th February 1871. — My reading for this
morning has been some vigorous chapters
of Taine’s History of English Literature.
Taine is a writer whose work always pro-
duces a disagreeable impression upon me,
as though of a creaking of pulleys and a
clicking of machinery ; there is a smell of
the laboratory about it. His style is the
style of chemistry and technology. The
science of it is inexorable; it is dry and
forcible, penetrating and hard, strong and
harsh, but altogether lacking in charm,
humanity, nobility, and grace. The dis-
agreeable effect which it makes on one’s
taste, ear, and heart, depends probably
upon two things: upon the moral philoso-
phy of the author and upon his literary
principles. The profound contempt for
humanity which characterises the physic-
logical school, and the intrusion of tech-
nology into literature inaugurated by Balzac
and Stendhal, explain the underlying arid-
ity of which one is sensible in these pages,
and which seems to choke one like the gases
from a manufactory of mineral products.
The book is instructive in the highest de-
gree, but instead of animating and stirring,
it parches, corrodes, and saddens its reader.
It excites no feeling whatever ; it is simply

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 95

a means of information.—I imagine this
kind of thing will be the literature of the
future —a literature &@ lV’ Américaine, as
different as possible from Greek art, giving
us algebra instead of life, the formula instead
of the image, the exhalations of the crucible
instead of the divine madness of Apollo.
Cold vision will replace the joys of thought,

and we shall see the death of poetry, Epson
and dissected by science.

15th February 1871. — Without intend-
ing it, nations educate each other, while
having apparently nothing in view but their
own selfish interests. It was France who
made the Germany of the present, by at-
tempting its destruction during ten genera-
tions ; it is Germany who will regenerate
contemporary France, by the effort to
crush her. Revolutionary France will teach
equality to the Germans, who are by na-
ture hierarchical. Germany will teach the
French that rhetoric is not science, and
that appearance is not as valuable as real-
ity. The worship of prestige —that is to
say, of falsehood ; the passion for vainglory
—that is to say, for smoke and noise ;—
these are what must die in the interests of
the world. It is a false religion which is

96 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

being destroyed. I hope sincerely that this
war will issue in a new balance of things
better than any which has gone before —a
new Europe, in which the government of
the individual by himself will be the car-
dinal principle of society, in opposition to
the Latin principle, which regards the
individual as a thing, a means to an end,
an instrument of the Church or of the
State.

In the order and harmony which would
result from free adhesion and voluntary
submission to a common ideal, we should
see the rise of a new moral world. It would
be an equivalent, expressed in lay terms, to
the idea of a universal priesthood. The
model state ought to resemble a great
musical society in which every one submits
to be organised, subordinated, and disci-
plined for the sake of art, and:for the sake
of producing a masterpiece. Nobody is
coerced, nobody is made use of for selfish
purposes, nobody plays a hypocritical or
selfish part. All bring their talent to the
common stock, and contribute knowingly
and gladly to the common wealth. Even
self-love itself is obliged to help on the gen-.
eral action, under pain of rebuff should it
make itself apparent.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 97

18th February 1871.—It is in the novel
that the average vulgarity of German soci-
ety, and its inferiority to the societies of
France and England, are most clearly
visible. The notion of ‘bad taste’ seems
to have no place in German esthetics.
Their elegance has no grace in it; and they
cannot understand the enormous difference
there is between distinction (what is gentle-
manly, ladylike), and their stiff vornehm-
lichkeit. Their imagination lacks style,
training, education, and knowledge of the
world; it has an ill-bred air even in its
Sunday dress. The race is poetical and
intelligent, but common and ill-mannered.
Pliancy and gentleness, manners, wit,
vivacity, taste, dignity, and charm, are
qualities which belong to others.

Will that inner freedom of soul, that
profound harmony of all the faculties which
I have so often observed among the best
Germans, ever come to the surface? Will
the conquerors of to-day ever learn to civi-
lise and soften their forms of life? It is by
their future novels that we shall be able to
judge. As soon as they are capable of the
novel of ‘ good society’ they will have ex-
celled all rivals. Till then, finish, polish,
the maturity of social culture, are beyond

98 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

them ; they may have humanity of feeling,
but the delicacies, the little perfections of
life, are unknown to them. They may be
honest and well-meaning, but they are ut-
terly without savoir vivre.

22d February 1871. — Soirée at the
M——. About thirty people representing
our best society were there, a happy mixt-
ure of sexes and ages. There were gray
heads, young girls, bright faces, — the
whole framed in some Aubusson tapestries
which made a charming background, and
gave a soft air of distance to the brilliantly-
dressed groups.

In society people are expected to behave
as if they lived on ambrosia and concerned
themselves with nothing but the- loftiest
interests. Anxiety, need, passion, have
no existence. All realism is suppressed as
brutal. In a word, what we call ‘society’
proceeds for the moment on the flattering
illusory assumption that it is moving in an
ethereal atmosphere and breathing the air
of the gods. All vehemence, all natural
expression, all real suffering, all careless
familiarity, or any frank sign of passion,
are startling and distasteful in this delicate
milieu; they at once destroy the common

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 99

work, the cloud palace, the magical archi-
tectural whole, which has been raised by
the general consent and effort. It is like
the sharp cock-crow which breaks the spell
of all enchantments, and puts the fairies to
flight. These select gatherings produce,
without knowing it, a sort of concert for
eyes and ears, an improvised work of art.
By the instinctive collaboration of every-
body concerned, intellect and taste hold
festival, and the associations of reality are
exchanged for the associations of imagina-
tion. So understood,’society is a form of
poetry ; the cultivated classes deliberately
recompose the idyll of the past and the
buried world of Astrea. Paradox or no,
I believe that these fugitive attempts to re-
construct a dream whose only end is beauty
represent confused reminiscences of an age
of gold haunting the human heart, or rather
aspirations towards a harmony of things
which everyday reality denies to us, and of
which art alone gives us a glimpse.

28th April 1871.—For a psychologist it
is extremely interesting to be readily and
directly conscious of the complications of
one’s own organism and the play of its sev-
eral parts. It seems to me that the sutures

100 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

of my being are becoming just loose enough
to allow me at once a clear perception of
myself as a whole and a distinct sense of
my own brittleness. A feeling like this
makes personal existence a perpetual aston-
ishment and curiosity. Instead of only
seeing the world which surrounds me, I
analyse myself. Instead of being single,
all of a piece, I become legion, multitude,
a whirlwind —a very cosmos. Instead of
living on the surface, I take possession of
my inmost self, I apprehend myself, if not
in my cells and atoms, at least so far as my
groups of organs, almost my tissues, are
concerned. In other words, the central
monad isolates itself from all the subordi-
nate monads, that it may consider them,
and finds its harmony again in itself.
Health is the perfect balance between our
organism, with all its component parts, and
the outer world; it serves us especially
for acquiring a knowledge of that world.
Organic disturbance obliges us to set up
a fresh and more spiritual equilibrium, to
withdraw within the soul. Thereupon our
bodily constitution itself becomes the object
of thought. It is no longer we, although
it may belong to us; it is nothing more
than the vessel in which we make the pas-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. IOI

sage of life, a vessel of which we study the
weak points and the structure without
identifying it with our own individuality.
Where is the ultimate residence of the
self? In thought, or rather in conscious-
ness. But below consciousness there is its
germ, the punctum saliens of spontaneity ;
for consciousness is not primitive, it be-
comes. The question is, can the thinking
monad return into its envelope, that is to
say, into pure spontaneity, or even into the
dark abyss of virtuality? Ihopenot. The
kingdom passes; the king remains; or
rather is it the royalty alone which sub-
sists, —that is to say, the idea, — the per-
sonality being in its turn merely the passing
vesture of the permanent idea? Is Leib-
nitz or Hegel right? Is the individual im-
mortal under the form of the spiritual body ?
Is he eternal under the form of the indi-
vidual idea? Who saw most clearly, St.
Paul or Plato? The theory of Leibnitz
attracts me most because it opens to us an
infinite of duration, of multitude, and evo-
lution. For a monad, which is the virtual
universe, a whole infinite of time is not
too much to develop the infinite within it.
Only one must admit exterior actions and
influences which affect the evolution of the

102 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

monad. Its independence must be a mobile
and increasing quantity between zero and
the infinite, without ever reaching either
completeness or nullity, for the monad can
be neither absolutely passive nor entirely
free.

21st June 1871.— The international so-
cialism of the owvriers, ineffectually put
down in Paris, is beginning to celebrate its
approaching victory. For it there is neither
country, nor memories, nor property, nor
religion. There is nothing and nobody but
itself. Its dogma is equality, its prophet is
Mably, and Babceuf is its god.®

How is the conflict to be solved, since
there is no longer one single common prin-
ciple between the partisans and the enemies
of the existing form of society, between
liberalism and the worship of equality ?
Their respective notions of man, duty, hap-
piness, — that is to say, of life and its end,
—differ radically. I suspect that the com-
munism of the Internationale is merely the
pioneer of Russian nihilism, which will be
the common grave of the old races and the
servile races, the Latins and the Slavs. If
so, the salvation of humanity will depend
upon individualism of the brutal American

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 103

sort. I believe that the nations of the pres-
ent are rather tempting chastisement than
learning wisdom. Wisdom, which means
balance and harmony, is only met with in
individuals. Democracy, which means the ~
rule of the masses, gives preponderance to
instinct, to nature, to the passions, — that
is to say, to blind impulse, to elemental
gravitation, to generic fatality. Perpetual
vacillation between contraries becomes its
only mode of progress, because it represents
that childish form of prejudice which falls
in love and cools, adores and curses, with
the same haste and unreason. A succession
of opposing follies gives an impression of
change which the people readily identify
with improvement, as though Enceladus
was more at ease on his left side than on
his right, the weight of the volcano remain-
ing the same. The stupidity of Demos is
only equalled by its presumption. It is like
a youth with all his animal and none of his
reasoning powers developed.

Luther’s comparison of humanity to a ~
drunken peasant, always ready to fall from
his horse on one side or the other, has always
struck me as a particularly happy one. It is
not that I deny the right of the democracy,
but I have no sort of illusion as to the use it

104 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

will make of its right, so long, at any rate,
as wisdom is the exception and conceit the
rule. Numbers make law, but goodness
has nothing to do with figures. Every fic-
tion is self-expiating, and democracy rests
upon this legal fiction, that the majority has
not only force but reason on its side — that
it possesses not only the right to act but the
wisdom necessary for action. The fiction
is dangerous because of its flattery ; the
demagogues have always flattered the pri-
vate feelings of the masses. The masses
will always be below the average. Besides,
the age of majority will be lowered, the
barriers of sex will be swept away, and
democracy will finally make itself absurd
by handing over the decision of all that is
greatest to all that is most incapable. Such
an end will be the punishment of its ab-
stract principle of equality, which dispenses
the ignorant man from the necessity of self-
training, the foolish man from that of self-
judgment, and tells the child that there is
no need for him to become a man, and the
good-for-nothing that self-improvement is
of no account. Public law, founded upon
virtual equality, will destroy itself by its
consequences. It will not recognise the in-
equalities of worth, of merit, and of experi-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 105

ence; in a word, it ignores individual la-
bour, and it will end in the triumph of
platitude and the residuum. The régime
of the Parisian Commune has shown us
what kind of material comes to the top in
these days of frantic vanity and universal
suspicion.

Still, humanity is tough, and survives all
catastrophes. Only it makes one impatient
to see the race always taking the longest
road to an end, and exhausting all possible
faults before it is able to accomplish one
definite step towards improvement. These
innumerable follies, that are to be and must
be, have an irritating effect upon me. The
more majestic is the history of science, the
more intolerable is the history of politics
and religion. The mode of progress in the
moral world seems an abuse of the patience
of God.

Enough! There is no help in misan-
thropy and pessimism. If our race vexes
us, let us keep a decent silence on the mat-
ter. We are imprisoned on the same ship,
and we shall sink with it. Pay your own
debt, and leave the rest to God. Sharer, as
you inevitably are, in the sufferings of your
kind, set a good example: thatis all which |
is asked of you. Do all the good you can, |

106 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

and say all the truth you know or be-
_ lieve ; and for the rest be patient, resigned,
submissive. God does His business, do
yours.

29th July 1871.—So long as a man is
capable of self-renewal he is a living being.
Goethe, Schleiermacher and Humboldt,
were masters of the art. If we are to re-
main among the living there must be a per-
petual revival of youth within us, brought
about by inward change and by love of the
Platonic sort. The soul must be for ever
recreating itself, trying all its various modes,
vibrating in all its fibres, raising up new in-
terests for itself... .

The Epistles and the Epigrams of Goethe
which I have been reading to-day do not
make one love him. Why? Because he
has so little soul. His way of understand-
ing love, religion, duty, and patriotism has
something mean and repulsive init. There
is no ardour, no generosity, inhim. <A secret
barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, makes
itself felt through all the wealth and flexi-
bility of his talent. It is true that the
egotism of Goethe has at least this much
that is excellent in it, that it respects the
liberty of the individual, and is favourable

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 107

to all originality. But it will go out of its
way to help nobody ; it will give itself no
trouble for anybody ; it will lighten nobody
else’s burden ;—in a word, it does away
with charity, the great Christian virtue.
Perfection for Goethe consists in personal
nobility, not in love; his standard is xs-
thetic, not moral He ignores holiness,
and has never allowed himself to reflect on
the dark problem of evil. A Spinozist to
the core, he believes in individual luck, not
in liberty nor in responsibility. He is a
Greek of the great time, to whom the in-
ward crises of the religious consciousness
areunknown. He represents, then, a state
of soul earlier than or subsequent to Chris-
tianity, what the prudent critics of our time
call the ‘modern spirit ;’ and only one
tendency of the modern spirit — the wor-
ship of nature. For Goethe stands outside
all the social and political aspirations of the
generality of mankind ; he takes no more
interest than Nature herself in the disin-
herited, the feeble, and the oppressed. . .
The restlessness of our time does not
exist for Goethe and his school. It is ex-
plicable enough. The deaf have no sense
of dissonance. The man who knows noth-
ing of the voice of conscience, the voice of

108 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

regret or remorse, cannot even gucss at
the troubles of those who live under two
masters and two laws, and belong to two
worlds, — that of Nature and that of Lib-
erty. For himself, his choice is made.
But humanity cannot choose and exclude.
All needs are vocal at once in the ery of
her suffering. She hears the men of science,
but she listens to those who talk to her of
religion ; pleasure attracts her, but sacrifice
moves her; and she hardly knows whether
she hates or whether she adores the crucifix.

Later. —Still re-reading the sonnets and
the miscellaneous poems of Goethe. — The
impression left by this part of the Gedichte
is much more favourable than that made
upon me by the Elegies and the Epigrams.
The Water Spirits and The Divine are es-
pecially noble in feeling. One must never
be too hasty in judging these complex
natures. Completely lacking as he is in
the sense of obligation and of sin, Goethe
nevertheless finds his way to seriousness
through dignity. Greek sculpture has been
his school of virtue. ;

15th August 1871.—Re-read, for the
second time, Renan’s Vie de Jésus, in the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 10g

sixteenth popular edition. The most char-
acteristic feature of this analysis of Chris-
tianity is that sin plays no part at all in it.
Now, if anything explains the success of
the Gospel among men, it is that it brought
them deliverance from sin—in a word,
salvation. A man, however, is bound to
explain a religion seriously, and not to shirk
the very centre of his subject. This white-
marble Christ is not the Christ who inspired
the martyrs and has dried so many tears.
The author lacks moral seriousness, and
confounds nobility of character with holi-
ness. He speaks as an artist conscious of
a pathetic subject, but his moral sense is
not interested in the question. It is not
possible to mistake the epicureanism of the
imagination, delighting itself in an esthetic
spectacle, for the struggles of a soul passion-
ately in search of truth. In Renan there
are still some remains of priestly ruse ; he
strangles with sacred cords. His tone of
contemptuous indulgence towards a more
or less captious clergy might be tolerated,
but he should have shown a more respectful
sincerity in dealing with the sincere and the
spiritual. Laugh at Pharisaism as you will,
but speak simply and plainly to honest
folk.9

Ilo AMIEL’S JOURNAL. f

Later.— To understand is to be con-
scious of the fundamental unity of the
thing to be explained — that is to say, to
conceive it in its entirety both of life and
development, to be able to remake it by a
mental process without making a mistake,
without adding or omitting anything. It
means, first, complete identification of the
object, and then the power of making it
clear to others by a full and just interpreta-
tion. To understand is more difficult than
to judge, for understanding is the transfer-
ence of the mind into the conditions of the
object, whereas judgment is simply the
enunciation of the individual opinion.

25th August 1871 (Charnex-sur-Mont-
reux). — Magnificent weather. The morn-
ing seems bathed in happy peace, and a
heavenly fragrance rises from mountain
and shore; it is as though a benediction
were laid upon us. No vulgar intrusive
noise disturbs the religious quiet of the
scene. One might believe oneself in a
church — a vast temple in which every being
and every natural beauty has its place. f
dare not breathe for fear of putting the
dream to flight,—a dream traversed by

angels.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 1

‘Comme autrefois j’entends dans ]’éther infini
La musique du temps et lVhosanna des
mondes.’
In these heavenly moments the cry of
Pauline rises to one’s lips1® ‘TI feel! I
believe! I see!’ All the miseries, the
cares, the vexations of life, are forgotten ;
the universal joy absorbs us ; we enter into
the divine order, and into the blessedness
of the Lord. Labour and tears, sin, pain,
and death have passed away. To exist is
to bless ; life is happiness. In this sublime
pause of things all dissonances have disap-
peared. It is as though creation were but
one vast symphony, glorifying the God of
goodness with an inexhaustible wealth of
praise and harmony. We question no
longer whether it is so or not. We have
ourselves become notes in the great con-
cert; and the soul breaks the silence of
ecstasy only to vibrate in unison with the
eternal joy.

22d September 1871 (Charnex). — Gray
sky—a melancholy day. A friend has
left me, the sun is unkind and capricious.
Everything passes away, everything for-
sakes us. And in place of all we have
lost, age and gray hairs !

112 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

. . . After dinner I walked to Chailly
between two showers. A rainy landscape
has a great charm for me; the dark tints
become more velvety, the softer tones more
ethereal. The country in rain is like a face
with traces of tears upon it, —less beauti-
ful no doubt, but more expressive.

Behind the beauty which is superficial,
gladsome, radiant, and palpable, the xs-
thetic sense discovers another order of
beauty altogether, hidden, veiled, secret,
and mysterious, akin to moral beauty.
This sort of beauty only reveals itself to
the initiated, and is all the more exquisite
for that. It is a little like the refined joy
of sacrifice, like the madness of faith, like
the luxury of grief; it is not within the
reach of all the world. Its attraction is
peculiar, and affects one like some strange
perfume, or bizarre melody. When once
the taste for it is set up the mind takes a
special and keen delight in it, for one finds
in it
‘Son bien premiérement, puis le dédain d’au-

trui,’
and it is pleasant to one’s vanity not to be
of the same opinion as the common herd.
This, however, is not possible with things

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 113

which are evident, and beauty which is in-
contestable. Charm, perhaps, is a better
name for the esoteric and paradoxical
beauty, which escapes the vulgar, and
appeals to our dreamy meditative side.
Classical beauty belongs, so to speak, to
all eyes ; it has ceased to belong to itself.
Esoteric beauty is shy and retiring. It
only unveils itself to unsealed eyes, and
bestows its favours only upon love.

This is why my friend , who places
herself immediately in relation with the
souls of those she meets, does not see the ©
ugliness of people when once she is inter-
ested in them. She likes and dislikes, and
those she likes are beautiful, those she
dislikes are ugly. There is nothing more
complicated in it than that. For her,
esthetic considerations are lost in moral
sympathy ; she looks with her heart only ;
she passes by the chapter of the beautiful,
and goes on to the chapter of charm. I
can do the same; only it is by reflection
and on second thoughts ; my friend does it
involuntarily and at once; she has not the
artistic fibre. The craving for a perfect
correspondence between the inside and the
outside of things—between matter and
form — is not in her nature. She does not

114 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

suffer from ugliness, she scarcely perceives
it. As for me, I can only forget what
shocks me, I cannot help being shocked.
All corporal defects irritate me, and the
want of beauty in women, being something
which ought not to exist, shocks me like a
tear, a solecism, a dissonance, a spot of
ink,—in a word, like something out of
order. On the other hand, beauty restores
and fortifies me like some miraculous food,
like Olympian ambrosia.

‘ Que le bon soit toujours camarade du beau
Dés demain je chercherai femme.
Mais comme le divorce entre eux n’est pas
nouveau,
Et que peu de beaux corps, hétes d’une belle
ame,
Assemblent l’un et l’autre point ——’

I will not finish, for after all one must
resign oneself. A beautiful soul in a
healthy body is already a rare and blessed
thing; and if one finds heart, common
sense, intellect, and courage into the bar-
gain, one may well do without that ravish-
ing dainty which we call beauty, and
almost without that delicious seasoning
which we call grace. We do without—
with a sigh, as one does without a luxury.
Happy we, to possess what is necessary.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. II5

29th December 1871. —I have been read-
ing Bahnsen (Critique de V évolutionisme de
Hegel-Hartmann, au nom des principes de
Schopenhauer). What a writer! Like a
cuttle-fish in water, every movement pro-
duces a cloud of ink which shrouds his
thought in darkness. And whata doctrine !
A thoroughgoing pessimism, which regards
the world as absurd, ‘absolutely idiotic,’
and reproaches Hartmann for having al-
lowed the evolution of the universe some
little remains of logic, while, on the con-
trary, this evolution is eminently contradic-
tory, and there is no reason anywhere
except in the poor brain of the reasoner.
Of all possible worlds that which exists is
the worst. Its only excuse is that it tends
of itself to destruction. The hope of the
philosopher is that reasonable beings will
shorten their agony and hasten the return
of everything to nothing. It is the philoso-
phy of a desperate Satanism, which has
not even the resigned perspectives of Bud-
dhism to offer to the disappointed and dis-
illusioned soul. The individual can but
protest and curse. This frantic Sivaism is
developed from the conception which makes
the world the product of blind will, the
principle of everything.

The acrid blasphemy of the doctrine

116 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

naturally leads the writer to indulgence in
epithets of bad taste which prevent our
regarding his work as the mere challenge of
a paradoxical theorist. We have really
to do with a theophobist, whom faith in
goodness rouses to a fury of contempt. In
order to hasten the deliverance of the
world, he kills all consolation, all hope,
and all illusion in the germ, and substitutes
for the love of humanity which inspired
Cakyamouni, that Mephistophelian gall
which defiles, withers, and corrodes every-
thing it touches.

Eyolutionism, fatalism, pessimism, nihil-
ism — how strange it is to see this desolate
and terrible doctrine growing and expand-
ing at the very moment when the German
nation is celebrating its greatness and its
triumphs! The contrast is so startling
that it sets one thinking.

This orgie of philosophic thought, iden-
tifying error with existence itself, and
developing the axiom of Proudhon, —
‘ Evil is God,’ will bring back the mass of
mankind to the Christian theodicy, which
is neither optimist nor pessimist, but simply
declares that the felicity which Christi-
anity calls eternal life is accessible to man.

Self-mockery, starting from a horror of

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 117

stupidity and hypocrisy, and standing in
the way of all wholeness of mind and all
true seriousness, — this is the goal to which
intellect brings us at last, unless conscience
cries out. The mind must have for ballast
the clear conception of duty, if it is not to
fluctuate between levity and despair.

Before giving advice we must have
secured its acceptance, or rather, have made
it desired.

If we begin by overrating the being we
love, we shall end by treating it with whole-
sale injustice.

It is dangerous to abandon oneself to the
luxury of grief ; it deprives one of courage,
and even of the wish for recovery.

We learn to recognise a mere blunting
of the conscience in that incapacity for
indignation which is not to be confounded
with the gentleness of charity, or the re-
serve of humility.

7th February 1872.— Without faith a
man can do nothing. But faith can stifle
all science.

118 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

What, then, is this Proteus, and whence ?

Faith is a certitude without proofs.
Being a certitude, it is an energetic princi-
ple of action. Being without proof, it is
the contrary of science. Hence its two
aspects and its two effects. Is its point
of departure intelligence? No. Thought
may shake or strengthen faith ; it cannot
produce it. Is its origin in the will? No:
good-will may favour it, ill-will may
hinder it, but no one believes by will, and
faith is not a duty. Faith is a sentiment,
for it is a hope ; it is an instinct, for it pre-
cedes all outward instruction. Faith is the
heritage of the individual at birth; it is
that which binds him to the whole of being.
The individual only detaches himself with
difficulty from the maternal breast; he
only isolates himself by an effort from the
nature around him, from the love which
enwraps him, the ideas in which he floats,
the cradle in which he lies. He is born in
union with humanity, with the world, and
with God. The trace of this original union
is faith. Faith is the reminiscence of that
vague Eden whence our individuality
issued, but which it inhabited in the som-
nambulist state anterior to the personal life

Our individual life consists in separating

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 119

ourselves from our milieu; in so reacting
upon it that we apprehend it consciously,
and make ourselves spiritual personalities
— that is to say, intelligent and free. Our
primitive faith is nothing more than the
neutral matter which our experience of
life and things works up afresh, and which
may be so affected by our studies of every
kind as to perish completely in its original
form. We ourselves may die before we
have been able to recover the harmony of
a personal faith which may satisfy our
mind and conscience as well as our hearts.
But the need of faith never leaves us. It
is the postulate of a higher truth which is
to bring all things into harmony. It is the
stimulus of research ; it holds out to us the
reward, it points us to the goal. Such at
least is the true, the excellent faith. That
which is a mere prejudice of childhood,
which has never known doubt, which
ignores science, which cannot respect or
understand or tolerate different convictions
—such a faith is a stupidity and a hatred,
the mother of all fanaticisms. We may
then repeat of faith what sop said of the
tongue —

‘ Quid melius lingua, lingua quid pejus eidem?’

120 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

To draw the poison-fangs of faith in our.
selves, we must subordinate it to the love of
truth. The supreme worship of the true is
' the only means of purification for all re-
ligions, all confessions, all sects. Faith
should only be allowed the second place,
for faith has a judge—in truth. When
she exalts herself to the position of su-
preme judge the world is enslaved: Chris-
tianity, from the fourth to the seventeenth
century, is the proof it. . . . Will the en-
lightened faith ever conquer the vulgar
faith? We must look forward in trust to
a better future.

The difficulty, however, is this. A nar-
row faith has much more energy than an
enlightened faith; the world belongs to
will much more than to wisdom. It is
not then certain that liberty will triumph
over fanaticism ; and besides, independent
thought will never have the force of preju-
dice. The solution is to be found in a divi-
sion of labour. After those whose busi-
ness it will have been to hold up to the
world the ideal of a pure and free faith,
will come the men of violence, who will
bring the new creed within the circle of
recognised interests, prejudices, and insti-
tutions. Is not this just what happened to

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 121

Christianity ? After the gentle Master,
the impetuous Paul and the bitter Councils.
It is true that this is what corrupted the
Gospel. But still Christianity has done
more good than harm to humanity, and
so the world advances, by the successive
decay of gradually improved ideals.

19th June 1872.—The wrangle in the
Paris Synod still goes on.4 The supernat-
ural is the stone of stumbling. — It might
be possible to agree on the idea of the
Divine ; but no, that is not the question —
the chaff must be separated from the good
grain. The supernatural is miracle, and |
miracle is an objective phenomenon inde-
pendent of all preceding causality. Now,
miracle thus understood cannot be proved
experimentally ; and besides, the subjective
phenomena, far more important than all
the rest, are left out of account in the
definition. Men will not see that miracle
is a perception of the soul; a vision of the
Divine behind nature; a psychical crisis,
analogous to that of A®neas on the last day
of Troy, which reveals to us the heavenly
powers prompting and directing human
action. For the indifferent there are no
miracles. It is only the religious souls who *

122 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

are capable of recognising the finger of
God in certain given facts.

The minds which have reached the doc-
trine of immanence are incomprehensible
to the fanatics of transcendence. They
will never understand—these last —that
the panentheism of Krause is ten times
more religious than their dogmatic super-
naturalism, Their passion for the facts
which are objective, isolated, and past, pre-
vents them from seeing the facts which
are eternal and spiritual. They can only
adore what comes to them from without.
As soon as their dramaturgy is interpreted
symbolically all seems to them lost. They
must have their local prodigies — their van-
ished unverifiable miracles, because for
them the divine is there and only there.

This faith can hardly fail to conquer
among the races pledged to the Cartesian
dualism, who call the incomprehensible
clear, and abhor what is profound. Women
also will always find local miracle more
easy to understand than universal mira-
cle, and the visible objective intervention
of God more probable than His psycholog-
ical and inward action. The Latin world
by its mental form is doomed to petrify
‘its abstractions, and to remain for eyer

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 123

outside the inmost sanctuary of life, that
central hearth where ideas are still undi-
vided, without shape or determination.
The Latin mind makes everything objec-
tive, because it remains outside things,
and outside itself. It is like the eye which
only perceives what is exterior to it, and
which cannot see itself except artificially,
and from a distance, by means of the re-
flecting surface of a mirror.

380th August 1872. — A priori speculations
weary me now as much as anybody. All
the different scholasticisms make me doubt-
ful of what they profess to demonstrate,
because, instead of examining, they affirm
from the beginning. Their object is to
throw up entrenchments around a preju-
dice, and not to discover the truth. They
accumulate that which darkens rather
than that which enlightens. They are de-
scended, all of them, from the Catholic
procedure, which excludes comparison,
information, and previous examination.
Their object is to trick men into assent, to
furnish faith with arguments, and to sup-
press free inquiry. But to persuade me, a
man must have no parti pris, and must
begin with showing a temper of critical

>

124 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

sincerity ; he must explain to me how the
matter lies, point out to me the questions
involved in it, their origin, their difficulties,
the different solutions attempted, and their
degree of probability. He must respect
my reason, my conscience, and my liberty.
All scholasticism is an attempt to take by
storm; the authority pretends to explain
itself, but only pretends, and its deference
is merely illusory. The dice are loaded
and the premisses are prejudged. The un-
known is taken as known, and all the rest
is deduced from it.

Philosophy means the complete liberty of
the mind, and therefore independence of
all social, political, or religious prejudice.
It is to begin with neither Christian nor
pagan, neither monarchical nor democratic,
neither socialist nor individualist ; it is erit-
ical and impartial; it loves one thing only
—truth. If it disturbs the ready-made
opinions of the Church or the State — of the
historical medium —in which the philoso-
pher happens to have been born, so much
the worse, but there is no help for iv.

‘Est ut est aut non est.’

Philosophy means, first, doubt ; and after-
wards the consciousness of what knowledge

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 125

means, the consciousness of uncertainty
and of ignorance, the consciousness of
limit, shade, degree, possibility. The or-
dinary man doubts nothing and suspects
nothing. The philosopher is more cautious,
but he is thereby unfitted for action, be-
cause, although he sees the goal less dimly
than others, he sees his own weakness too
clearly, and has no illusions as to his
chances of reaching it.

The philosopher is like a man fasting in
the midst of universal intoxication. He
alone perceives the illusion of which all
creatures are the willing playthings; he is
less duped than his neighbour by his own
nature. He judges more sanely, he sees
things as they are. It is in this that his lib-
erty consists —in the ability to see clearly
and soberly, in the power of mental record.
Philosophy has for its foundation critical
lucidity. The end and climax of it would
be the intuition of the universal law, of
» the first principle and the final aim of the
universe. Not to be deceived is its first
desire: to understand, its second. Eman-
cipation from error is the condition of real
knowledge. The philosopher is a sceptic~
seeking a plausible hypothesis, which may
explain to him the whole of his experiences.

126 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

When he imagines that he has found such
a key to life he offers it to, but does not
force it on, his fellow-men.

9th October 1872.—I have been taking
tea at the M.’s. These English homes are
very attractive. They are the recompense
and the result of a long-lived civilisation,
and of an ideal untiringly pursued. What
ideal? That of a moral order, founded on
respect for self and for others, and on rey-
erence for duty —in a word, upon personal
worth and dignity. The master shows
consideration to his guests, the children
are deferential to their parents, and every
one and everything has its place. They
understand both how to command and how
to obey. ‘The little world is well governed,
and seems to go of itself ; duty is the genius
loci — but duty tinged with a reserve and
self-control which is the English character-
istic. The children are the great test of this
domestic system: they are happy, smiling,
trustful, and yet no trouble. One feels that
they know themselves to be loved, ‘but that
they know also that they must obey. Our
children behave like masters of the house,
and when any definite order comes to limit
their encroachments they see in it an abuse

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 127

of power, an arbitrary act. Why? Be-
cause it is their principle to believe that
everything turns round them. Our children
may be gentle and affectionate, but they
are not grateful, and they know nothing of
self-control.

How do English mothers attain this re-
sult? By a rule which is impersonal, inva-
riable, and firm; in other words, by law,
which forms man for liberty, while arbitrary
decree only leads to rebellion and attempts
at emancipation. This method has the
immense advantage of forming characters
which are restive under arbitrary authority,
and yet amenable to justice, conscious of
what is due to them and what they owe to
others, watchful over conscience, and prac-
tised in self-government. In every English
child one feels something of the national
motto — ‘God and my right,’ and in every
English household one has a sense that the
home is a citadel, or better still, a ship in
which every one has his place. Naturally
in such a world the value set on family life
corresponds with the cost of producing it ;
it is sweet to those whose efforts main-
tain it.

14th October 1872. —The man who gives

128 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

himself to contemplation looks on at rather
than directs his life, is rather a spectator
than an actor, seeks rather to understand
than to achieve. Is this mode of existence
illegitimate, immoral? Is one bound to
act? Is such detachment an idiosyncrasy
to be respected or a sim to be fought
against? I have always hesitated on this
point, and I have wasted years in futile
self-reproach and useless fits of activity.
My western conscience, penetrated as it is
with Christian morality, has always perse-
cuted my Oriental quietism and Buddhist
tendencies. I have not dared to approve
myself, I have not known how to correct
myself. In this, as in all else, I have re-
mained divided and perplexed, wavering
between two extremes. So equilibrium is
somehow preserved, but the crystallisation
of action or thought becomes impossible.
Having early caught a glimpse of the
absolute, I have never had the indiscreet
effrontery of individualism. What right
have I to make a merit of a defect? Ihave
never been able to see any necessity for
imposing myself upon others, nor for suc-
ceeding. I have seen nothing clearly except
my own deficiencies and the superiority of
others. That is not the way to make a

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 129

career. With varied aptitudes and a fair
intelligence, I had no dominant tendency,
no imperious faculty, so that while by vir-
tue of capacity I felt myself free, yet when
free I could not discover what was best.
Equilibrium produced indecision, and inde-
cision has rendered all my faculties barren.

8th November 1872 (Friday). —I have
been turning over the Stoics again. Poor
Louisa Siefert !12. Ah! we play the Stoic,
and all the while the poisoned arrow in the
side pierces and wounds, lethalis arundo.
What is it that, like all passionate souls,
she really craves for? Two things which
are contradictory — glory and happiness.
She adores two incompatibles — the Refor-
mation and the Revolution, France and the
contrary of France: her talent itself is a
combination of two opposing qualities, in-
wardness and brilliancy, noisy display and
lyrical charm. She dislocates the rhythm
of her verse, while at the same time she has
a sensitive ear for rhyme. She is always
wavering between Valmore and Baudelaire,
between Leconte de Lisle and Sainte-Beuve
— that is to say, her taste is a bringing to-
gether of extremes. She herself has de-
scribed it ; —

130 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

‘ Toujours extréme en mes désirs,
Jadis, enfant joyeuse et folle,
Souvent une seule parole
Bouleversait tous mes plaisirs.’

But what a fine instrument she possesses !
what strength of soul! what wealth of
imagination !°

38d December 1872. — What a strange
dream! I was under an illusion and yet
not under it; I was playing a comedy to
myself, deceiving my imagination without
being able to deceive my consciousness.
This power which dreams have of fusing
incompatibles together, of uniting what is
exclusive, of identifying yes and no, is what
is most wonderful and most symbolical in
them. In a dream our individuality is not
shut up within itself; it envelops, so to
speak, its surroundings ; it is the landscape,
and all that it contains, ourselves included.
But if our imagination is not our own, if
it is impersonal, then personality is but a
special and limited case of its general func-
tions. .A fortiori it would be the same for
thought. And if so, thought might exist
without possessing itself individually, with-
out embodying itself in an ego. In other

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 131

words, dreams lead us to the idea of an
imagination enfranchised from the limits
of personality, and even of a thought which
should be no longer conscious. ‘The indi-
vidual who dreams is on the way to become
dissolved in the universal phantasmagoria
of Maia. Dreams are excursions into the
limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from
the human prison. The man who dreams
is but the locale of various phenomena, of
which he is the spectator in spite of him-
self; he is passive and impersonal; he is
the plaything of unknown vibrations and
invisible sprites.

The man who should never issue from
the state of dream would have never at-
tained humanity, properly so called, but
the man who had never dreamed would
only know the mind in its completed or
manufactured state, and would not be able
to understand the genesis of personality ;
he would be like a crystal, incapable of
guessing what crystallisation means. So
that the waking life issues from the dream
life, as dreams are an emanation from the
nervous life, and this again is the fine flower
of organic life. Thought is the highest
point of a series of ascending metamor-
phoses, which is called nature. Personality

132 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

by means of thought recovers in inward
profundity what it has lost in extension,
and makes up for the rich accumulations
of receptive passivity by the enormous priy-
ilege of that empire over self which is called
liberty. Dreams, by confusing and sup-
pressing all limits, make us feel, indeed, the
severity of the conditions attached to the
higher existence ; but conscious and volun-
tary thought alone brings knowledge and
allows us to act —that is to say, is alone
capable of science and of perfection. Let
us then take pleasure in dreaming for rea-
sons of psychological curiosity and mental
recreation; but let us never speak ill of
thought, which is our strength and our dig-
nity. Let us begin as Orientals, and end
as Westerns, for these are the two halves of
wisdom. d

11th December 1872. — A deep and dream-
less sleep ; and now I wake up to the gray,
lowering, rainy sky, which has kept us
company for so long. The air is mild, the
general outlook depressing. I think that it
is partly the fault of my windows, which
are not very clean, and contribute by their
dimness to this gloomy aspect of the outer
world. Rain and smoke have besmeared
them.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 133

Between us and things how many screens
there are! Mood, health, the tissues of the
eye, the window-panes of our cell, mist,
smoke, rain, dust, and light itself —and all
infinitely variable! Heraclitus said: No
man bathes twice in the same river. I feel
inclined to say: No one sees the same
landscape twice over, for a window is one
kaleidoscope, and the spectator another.

What is madness? Illusion, raised to
the second power. A sound mind estab-
lishes regular relations, a modus vivendi,
between things, men, and itself, and it is
under the delusion that it has got hold of
stable truth and eternal fact. Madness
does not even see what sanity sees, deceiv-
ing itself all the while by the belief that it
sees better than sanity. The sane mind or
common sense confounds the fact of experi-
ence with necessary fact, and assumes in
good faith that what is, is the measure of
what may be; while madness cannot per-
ceive any difference between what is and
what it imagines — it confounds its dreams
with reality.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both
to madness and to common sense, and in
lending oneself to the universal illusion
without becoming its dupe. It is best, on

134 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

the whole, for a man of taste who knows
how to be gay with the gay, and serious
with the serious, to enter into the game of
Maia, and to play his part with a good
grace in the fantastic tragi-comedy which
is called the Universe. It seems to me that
here intellectualism reaches its limit.
The mind, in its intellectual capacity, ar-
rives at the intuition that all reality is but
the dream of a dream. What delivers us
from the palace of dreams is pain, personal
pain ; it is also the sense of obligation, or
that which combines the two, the pain of
sin; and again it is love; in short, the
moral order. What saves us from the sor-
ceries of Maia is conscience; conscience
dissipates the narcotic vapours, the opium-
like hallucinations, the placid stupor of
contemplative indifference. It drives us
into contact with the terrible wheels within
wheels of human suffering and human re-
sponsibility ; it is the bugle-call, the cock-
crow, which puts the phantoms to flight ;
it is the armed archangel who chases man
from an artificial paradise. Intellectualism
may be described as an intoxication con-
scious of itself; the moral energy which
replaces it, on the other hand, represents
a state of fast, a famine and a sleepless
thirst. Alas! Alas!

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 135

Those who have the most frivolous idea
of sin are just those who suppose that there
is a fixed gulf between good people and
others.

The ideal which the wife and mother
makes for herself, the manner in which she
understands duty and life, contain the fate
of the community. Her faith becomes the
star of the conjugal ship, and her love the
animating principle that fashions the future
of all belonging to her. Woman is the sal-
vation or destruction of the family. She car-
ries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.

Perhaps it is not desirable that a woman
should be free in mind ; she would immedi-
ately abuse her freedom. She cannot be-
come philosophical without losing her spe-
cial gift, which is the worship of all that is
individual, the defence of usage, manners,
beliefs, traditions. Her réle is to slacken
the combusticn of thought. It is analogous
to that of azote in vital air.

In every loving woman there isa priestess
of the past —a pious guardian of some af-
fection, of which the object has disappeared.

136 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

6th January 1873. —I1 have been reading
the seven tragedies of ischylus, in the
translation of Leconte de Lisle. The Pro-
metheus and the EHumenides are greatest
where all is great ; they have the sublimity
of the old prophets. Both depict a religious
revolution — a profound crisis in the life of
humanity. In Prometheus it is civilisation ~
wrenched from the jealous hands of the
gods ; in the Eumenides it-is the transfor-
mation of the idea of justice, and the substi-
tution of atonement and pardon for the law
of implacable revenge. Prometheus shows
us the martyrdom which waits for all the
saviours of men ; the Eumenides is the glori-
fication of Athens and the Areopagus — that
is to say, of a truly human civilisation.
How magnificent it is as poetry, and how
small the adventures of individual passion
seem beside this colossal type of tragedy,
of which the theme is the destinies of na-
tions |

31st March 1873 (4 p.m.) —

‘En quel songe
Se plonge
Mon cceur, et que veut-il?’

For an hour past I have been the prey of
a vague anxiety ; I recognise my old enemy.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 137

. . . It is a sense of void and anguish ; a
sense of something lacking: what? Love,
peace — God perhaps. The feeling is one
of pure want unmixed with hope, and there
is anguish in it because I can clearly dis-
tinguish neither the evil nor its remedy.

‘O printemps sans pitié, dans l’Ame endolorie,
Avec tes chants d’oiseaux, tes brises, ton azur,
Tu creuses sourdement, conspirateur obscur,
Le gouffre des languers et de la réverie.’

Of all the hours of the day, in fine weather,
the afternoon, about three o’clock, is the
time which to me is most difficult to bear.
I never feel more strongly than I do then,
‘le vide effrayant de la vie,’ the stress of
mental anxiety, or the painful thirst for
happiness. This torture born of the sun-
light is a strange phenomenon. Is it that
the sun, just as it brings out the stain upon
a garment, the wrinkles in a face, or the
discoloration of the hair, so also it illumines
with inexorable distinctness the scars and
rents of the heart? Does it rouse in us a
sort of shame of existence? In any case
the bright hours of the day are capable of
flooding the whole soul with melancholy,
of kindling in us the passion for death, or
suicide, or annihilation, or of driving us to

138 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

that which is next akin to death, the dead-
ening of the senses by the pursuit of pleas-
ure. They rouse in the lonely man a horror
of himself ; they make him long to escape
from his own misery and solitude, —

‘Le coeur trempé sept fois dans le néant divin.’

People talk of the temptations to crime
connected with darkness, but the dumb
sense of desolation which is often the prod-
uct of the most brilliant moment of day-
light must not be forgotten either. From
the one, as from the other, God is absent ;
but in the first case a man follows his senses
and the cry of his passion; in the second,
he feels himself lost and bewildered, a
creature forsaken by all the world.

‘En nous sont deux instincts qui bravent la
raison,
C’est l’effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison.
Coeur solitaire, & toi prends garde!’

8d April 1873.—I have been to see my
friends ——. Their niece has just.arrived
with two of her children, and the conversa-
tion turned on Father Hyacinthe’s lecture.

Women of an enthusiastic temperament
have a curious way of speaking of extem-
pore preachers and orators. They imagine

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 139

that inspiration radiates from a crowd as
such, and that inspiration is all that is
wanted. Could there be a more naif and
childish explanation of what is really a lec-
ture in which nothing has been left to acci-
dent, neither the plan, nor the metaphors,
nor even the length of the whole, and where
everything has been prepared with the
greatest care ! But women, in their love
of what is marvellous and miraculous, prefer
to ignore all this. The meditation, the
labour, the calculation of effects, the art,
in a word, which have gone to the making
of it, diminishes for them the value of the
thing, and they prefer to believe it fallen
from Heaven, or sent down from on high.
They ask for bread, but cannot bear the
idea of a baker. The sex is superstitious,
and hates to understand what it wishes to
admire. It would vex it to be forced to
give the smaller share to feeling, and the
larger share to thought. It wishes to be-
lieve that imagination can do the work of
reason, and feeling the work of science, and
it never asks itself how it is that women,
so rich in heart and imagination, have never
distinguished themselves as orators, — that
is to say, have never known how to
combine a multitude of facts, ideas, and

r4o AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

impulses, into one complex unity. Enthu-
siastic women never even suspect the differ-
ence that there is between the excitement of
a popular harangue, which is nothing but a
mere passionate outburst, and the unfolding
of a didactic process, the aim of which is to
prove something and to convince its hearers.
Therefore, for them, study, reflection, tech-
nique, count as nothing; the improvisatore
mounts upon the tripod, Pallas all armed
issues from his lips, and conquers the ap-
plause of the dazzled assembly.

Evidently women divide orators into two
groups; the artizans of speech, who manu-
facture their laborious discourses by the
aid of the midnight lamp, and the inspired
souls, who simply give themselves the
trouble to be born. They will never un-
derstand the saying of Quintilian, ‘ Fit
orator, nascitur poeta.’

The enthusiasm which acts is perhaps
an enlightening force, but the enthusiasm
which accepts is very like blindness. For
this latter enthusiasm confuses the value of
things, ignores their shades of difference,
and is an obstacle to all sensible criticism
and all calm judgment. The ‘ Ewig-Weib-
liche’ favours exaggeration, mysticism, sen-
timentalism, —all that excites and startles.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. I4I

It is the enemy of clearness, of a calm and
rational view of things, the antipodes of
criticism and of science. I have had only
too much sympathy and weakness for the
feminine nature. The very excess of my
former indulgence towards it makes me
now more conscious of its infirmity. Justice
and science, law and reason, are virile
things, and they come before imagination;
feeling, reverie, and fancy. When one re-
flects that Catholic superstition is main-
tained by women, one feels how needful it
is not to hand over the reins to the ‘ Eternal
Womanly.’

23d May 1873.— The fundamental error
of France lies in her psychology. France
has always believed that to say a thing is
the same as to do it, as though speech were
action, as though rhetoric were capable of
modifying the tendencies, habits, and char-
acter of real beings, and as though verbiage
were an efficient substitute for will, con-
science, and education.

France proceeds by bursts of eloquence,
of cannonading, or of law-making: she
thinks that so she can change the nature of
things ; and she produces only phrases and
ruins. She has never understood the first

142 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

line of Montesquieu: ‘ Laws are necessary
relations, derived from the nature of things.’
She will not see that her incapacity to or-
ganise liberty comes from her own nature ;
from the notions which she has of the indi-
vidual, of society, of religion, of law, of
duty — from the manner in which she brings
up children. Her way is to plant trees
downwards, and then she is astonished at
the result! Universal suffrage, with a bad
religion and a bad popular education, means
perpetual wavering between anarchy and
dictatorship, between the red and the black,
between Danton and Loyola.

How many scapegoats will France sacri-
fice before it occurs to her to beat her own
breast in penitence ?

18th August 1873 ( Scheveningen).— Yes-
terday, Sunday, the landscape was clear and
distinct, the air bracing, the sea bright and
gleaming, and of an ashy blue colour.
There were beautiful effects of beach, sea,
and distance ; and dazzling tracks of gold
upon the waves, after the sun had sunk
below the bands of vapour drawn across
the middle sky, and before it had disap-
peared in the mists of the sea horizon.
The place was very full. All Scheveningen

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 143

and the Hague, the village and the capital,
had streamed out on to the terrace, amus-
ing themselves at innumerable tables, and
swamping the strangers and the bathers.
The orchestra played some Wagner, some
Auber, and some waltzes. What was all
the world doing? Simply enjoying life.

A thousand thoughts wandered through
my brain. I thought how much history it
had taken to make what I saw possible ;
Judea, Egypt, Greece, Germany, Gaul ;
all the centuries from Moses to Napoleon,
and all the zones from Batavia to Guiana,
had united in the formation of this gather-
ing. The industry, the science, the art,
the geography, the commerce, the religion
of the whole human race, are repeated in
every human combination; and what we
see before our own eyes at any given mo-
ment is inexplicable without reference to
all that has ever been. This interlacing of
the ten thousand threads which Necessity
weaves into the production of one single
phenomenon is a stupefying thought.. One
feels oneself in the presence of Law itself
—allowed a glimpse of the mysterious
workshop of Nature. The ephemeral per-
ceives the eternal.

What matters the brevity of the individ-

144 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

ual span, seeing that the generations, the
centuries, and the worlds themselves are
but occupied for ever with the ceaseless
reproduction of the hymn of life, in all the
hundred thousand modes and variations
which make up the universal symphony ?
The motive is always the same ; the monad
has but one law: all truths are but the
variation of one single truth. The universe
represents the infinite wealth of the Spirit
seeking in vain to exhaust all possibilities,
and the goodness of the Creator, who would
fain share with the created all that sleeps
within the limbo of Omnipotence.

To contemplate and adore, to receive and
give back, to have uttered one’s note and
moved one’s grain of sand, is all which is
expected from such insects as we are ; it is
enough to give motive and meaning to our
fugitive apparition in existence... .

After the concert was over the paved
esplanade behind the hotels and the two
roads leading to the Hague were alive with
people. One might have fancied oneself
upon one of the great Parisian boulevards
just when the theatres are emptying them-
selves — there were so many carriages, om-
nibuses, and cabs. Then, when the human
tumult had disappeared, the peace of the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 145

starry heaven shone out resplendent, and
the dreamy glimmer of the Milky Way was
only answered by the distant murmur of
the ocean.

Later. — What is it which has always
come between real life and me? What
glass screen has, as it were, interposed
itself between me and the enjoyment, the
possession, the contact of things, leaving
me only the réle of the looker-on ?

False shame, no doubt. I have been
ashamed to desire. Fatal result of timid-
ity, aggravated by intellectual delusion !
This renunciation beforehand of all natural
ambitions, this systematic putting aside of
all longings and all desires, has perhaps
been false in idea; it has been too like a
foolish, self-inflicted mutilation.

Fear, too, has had a large share in it —

‘La peur de ce que j’aime est ma fatalité.’

I very soon discovered that it was simpler
for me to give up a wish than to satiSfy it.
Not being able to obtain all that my nature
longed for, I renounced the whole en bloc,
without even taking the trouble to deter-
mine in detail what might have attracted
me; for what was the good of stirring up

146 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

trouble in oneself and evoking images of
inaccessible treasure ?

Thus I anticipated in spirit all possible
disillusions, in the true stoical fashion.
Only, with singular lack of logic, I have
sometimes allowed regret to overtake me,
and I have looked at conduct founded upon
exceptional principles with the eyes of the
ordinary man. I should have been ascetic
to the end; contemplation ought to have
been enough for me, especially now, when
the hair begins to whiten. But, after all, I
am aman, and notatheorem. A system
cannot suffer, but I suffer. Logic makes
only one demand—that of consequence ;
but life makes a thousand ; the body wants
health, the imagination cries out for beauty,
and the heart for love ; pride asks for con-
sideration, the soul yearns for peace, the
conscience for holiness; our whole being
is athirst for happiness and for perfec-
tion ; and we, tottering, mutilated, and in-
complete, cannot always feign philosophic
insengibility ; we stretch out our arms to-
wards life, and we say to it under our breath,
¢‘ Why — why — hast thou deceived me ??

19th August 1873 (Scheveningen).—I
have had a morning walk. It has been

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 147

raining in the night. There are large
clouds all round; the sea, veined with
green and drab, has put on the serious air
of labour. She is about her business, in no
threatening but at the same time in no
lingering mood. She is making her clouds,
heaping up her sands, visiting her shores
and bathing them with foam, gathering up
her floods for the tide, carrying the ships
to their destinations, and feeding the uni-
versal life. I found in a hidden nook a
sheet of fine sand which the water had fur-
rowed and folded like the pink palate of a
kitten’s mouth, or like a dappled sky.
Everything repeats itself by analogy, and
each little fraction of the earth reproduces
in a smaller and individual form all the
phenomena of the planet. — Farther on I
came across a bank of crumbling shells, and
it was borne in upon me that the sea-sand
itself might well be only the detritus of the
organic life of preceding eras, a vast monu-
ment or pyramid of immemorial age, built
up by countless generations of molluscs
who have laboured at the architecture of
the shores like good workmen of God. If
the dunes and the mountains are the dust
of living creatures who have preceded us,
how can we doubt but that our death will

148 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

be as serviceable as our life, and that noth-
ing which has been lent is lost? Mutual
borrowing and temporary service seem to
be the law of existence. Only, the strong
prey upon and devour the weak, and the
concrete inequality of lots within the ab-
stract equality of destinies wounds and dis-
quiets the sense of justice.

(Same day.) — A new spirit governs and
inspires the generation which will succeed
me. It is a singular sensation to feel the
grass growing under one’s feet, to see one-
self intellectually uprooted. One must ad-
dress one’s contemporaries. Younger men
will not listen to you. Thought, like love,
will not tolerate a gray hair. Knowledge
herself loves the young, as Fortune used to
do in olden days. Contemporary civilisa-
tion does not know what to do with old
age; in proportion as it deifies physical
experiment, it despises moral experience.
One sees therein the triumph of Darwin-
ism; it is a state of war, and war must
have young soldiers; it can only put up
with age in its leaders when they have the
strength and the mettle of veterans.

In point of fact, one must either be
strong or disappear, either constantly re-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 149

juvenate oneself or perish. It is as though
the humanity of our day had, like the
migratory birds, an immense voyage to
make across space; she can no longer sup-
port the weak or help on the laggards.
The great assault upon the Future makes
her hard and pitiless to all who fall by the
way. Her motto is, ‘The devil take the
hindmost.’

The worship of strength has never lacked
altars, but it looks as though the more we
talk of justice and humanity, the more
that other god sees his kingdom widen.

20th August 1873 (Scheveningen).—I
have now watched the sea which beats upon
this shore under many different aspects.
On the whole, I should class it with the
Baltic. As far as colour, effect, and land-
scape go, it is widely different from the
Breton or Basque ocean, and, above all,
from the Mediterranean. It never attains
to the blue-green of the Atlantic, nor the
indigo of the Ionian Sea. Its scale of
colour runs from flint to emerald, and when
it turns to blue, the blue is a turquoise shade
splashed with gray. The sea here is not
amusing itself; it has a busy and serious
air, like an Englishman or a Dutchman.

150 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Neither polyps nor jelly-fish, neither sea-
weed nor crabs, enliven the sands at low
water; the sea life is poor and meagre.
What is wonderful is the struggle of man
against a miserly and formidable power.
Nature has done little for him, but she
allows herself to be managed. Stepmother
though she be, she is accommodating, sub-
ject to the occasional destruction of a hun-
dred thousand lives in a single inundation.

The air inside the dune is altogether
different from that outside it. The air of
the sea is life-giving, bracing, oxydised ;
the air inland is soft, relaxing, and warm.
In the same way there are two Hollands in
every Dutchman: there is the man of
the polder, heavy, pale, phlegmatic, slow,
patient himself, and trying to the patience
of others, —and there is the man of the
dune, of the harbour, the shore, the sea,
who is tenacious, seasoned, persevering,
sunburnt, daring. Where the two agree
is in calculating prudence, and in methodi-
cal persistency of effort.

22d August 1873 (Scheveningen). —The
weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere
gray; it is a time favourable to thought
and meditation. I have a liking for such

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. I51

days as these; they revive one’s converse
with oneself and make it possible to live
the inner life: they are quiet and peaceful,
like a song ina minor key. We are noth-
ing but thought, but we feel our life to its
very centre. Our very sensations turn to
reverie. It is a strange state of mind; it
is like those silences in worship which are
not the empty moments of devotion, but the
full moments, and which are so because at
such times the soul, instead of being polar-
ised, dispersed, localised, in a single im-
pression or thought, feels her own totality
and is conscious of herself. She tastes her
own substance. She is no longer played
upon, coloured, set in motion, affected,
from without; she is in equilibrium and at
rest. Openness and self-surrender become
possible to her; she contemplates and she
adores. She sees the changeless and the
eternal enwrapping all the phenomena of
time. She is in the religious state, in har-
mony with the general order, or at least in
intellectual harmony. For holiness, indeed,
more is wanted —a harmony of will, a per-
fect self-devotion, death to self and absolute
submission.

Psychological peace —that harmony
which is perfect. but virtual—is but the

152 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

zero, the potentiality of all numbers; it is
not that moral peace which is victorious
over all ills, which is real, positive, tried by -
experience, and able to face whatever fresh
storms may assail it.

The peace of fact is not the peace of prin-
ciple. There are indeed two happinesses,
that of nature and that of conquest, — two
equilibria, that of Greece and that of Naz-
areth, — two kingdoms, that of the natural
man and that of the regenerate man.

Later (Scheveningen). — Why do doctors
so often make mistakes? Because they
are not sufficiently individual in their diag-
noses or their treatment. They class a sick
man under some given department of their
nosology, whereas every invalid is really
a special case, a unique example. How is
it possible that so coarse a method of sift-
ing should produce judicious therapeutics ?
Every illness is a factor simple or complex,
which is multiplied by a second factor,
invariably complex,—the individual, that
is to say, who is suffering from it, so that
the result is a special problem, demanding
a special solution, the more so the greater
the remoteness of the patient from child-
hood or from country life.

e

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 153

The principal grievance which I have
against the doctors is that they neglect the
_real problem, which is to seize the unity of
the individual who claims their care. Their
methods of investigation are far too ele-
mentary ; a doctor who does not read you
to the bottom is ignorant of essentials. To
me the ideal doctor would be a man en-
dowed with profound knowledge of life and
of the soul, intuitively divining any suffer-
ing or disorder of whatever kind, and re-
storing peace by his mere presence. Such
a doctor is possible, but the greater number
of them lack the higher and inner life, they
know nothing of the transcendent labora-
tories of nature; they seem to me super-
ficial, profane, strangers to divine things,
destitute of intuition and sympathy. The
model doctor should be at once a genius,
a saint, a man of God.

11th September 1873 (Amsterdam).— The
doctor has just gone. He says I have fever
about me, and does not think that I can
start for another three days without impru-
dence. I dare not write to my Genevese
friends and tell them that I am coming
back from the sea in a radically worse state
of strength and throat than when I went

154 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

there, and that I have only wasted my
time, my trouble, my money, and my
hopes. ...

This contradictory double fact—on the
one side an eager hopefulness springing up
afresh after all disappointments, and on the
other an experience almost invariably un-
favourable —can be explained like all illu-
sions by the whim of nature, which either
wills us to be deceived or wills us to ant as
if we were so.

Scepticism is the wiser course, but in de-
livering us from error it tends to paralyse
life. Maturity of mind consists in taking
part in the prescribed game as seriously as
though one believed in it. Good-humoured
compliance, tempered by a smile, is, on the
whole, the best line to take; one lends
oneself to an optical illusion, and the vol-
untary concession has an air of liberty.
Once imprisoned in existence, we must sub-
mit to its laws with a good grace; to rebel
against it only ends in impotent rage, when.
once we have denied ourselves the nolan
of suicide.

Humility and submission, or the cities
point of view; clear-eyed indulgence with
a touch of irony, or the point of view of
worldly wisdom, —these two attitudes are

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 155

possible. The second is sufficient for the
minor ills of life, the other is perhaps neces-
sary in the greater ones. The pessimism
of Schopenhauer supposes at least health
and intellect as means of enduring the rest
of life. But optimism either of the stoical
or the Christian sort is needed to make
it possible for us to bear the worst suffer-
ings of flesh, heart, and soul. If we are to
escape the grip of despair, we must believe
either that the whole of things at least is
good, or that grief is a fatherly grace, a
purifying trial.

There can be no doubt that the idea of a
happy immortality, serving as a harbour of
refuge from the tempests of this mortal
existence, and rewarding the fidelity, the
patience, the submission, and the courage
of the travellers on life’s sea — there can be
no doubt that this idea, the strength of so
many generations, and the faith of the
Church, carries with it inexpressible conso-
lation to those who are wearied, burdened,
and tormented by pain and suffering. To
feel oneself individually cared for and pro-
tected by God gives a speciui dignity and
beauty to life. Monotheism lightens the
struggle for existence. But does the study
of nature allow of the maintenance of those

156 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

local revelations which are called Mosaism,
Christianity, Islamism? These religions,
founded upon an infantine cosmogony, and
upon a chimerical history of humanity, can
they bear confronting with modern astron-
omy and geology? ‘The present mode of
escape, which consists in trying to satisfy
the claims of both science and faith, — of
the science which contradicts all the ancient
beliefs, and the faith which, in the case of
things that are beyond nature and incapable
of verification, affirms them on her own
responsibility only, —this mode of escape
cannot last for ever. Every fresh cosmical
conception demands a religion which cor-
responds to it. Our age of transition stands
bewildered between the two incompatible
methods, the scientific method and the relig-
ious method, and between the two certi-
tudes, which contradict each other.

Surely the reconciliation of the two must
be sought for in the moral law, which is
also a fact, and every step of which requires
for its explanation another cosmos than the
cosmos of necessity. Who knows if neces-
sity is not a particular case of liberty, and
its condition? Who knows if nature is
not a laboratory for the fabrication of think-
ing beings who are ultimately to become

ee

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. © 157

free creatures? Biology protests, and in-
deed the supposed existence of souls, inde-
pendently of time, space, and matter, is a
fiction of faith, less logical than the Platonic
dogma. But the question remains open.
We may eliminate the idea of purpose from
nature, yet, as the guiding conception of
the highest being of our planet, it is a fact,
and a fact which postulates a meaning in
the history of the universe.

My thought is straying in vague paths:
why ? — because I have no creed. All my
studies end in notes of interrogation, and
that I may not draw premature or arbitrary
conclusions I draw none.

Later on.— My creed has melted away,
but I believe in good, in the moral order,
and in salvation ; religion for me is to live
and die in God, in complete abandonment
to the holy will which is at the root of
nature and destiny. I believe even in the
Gospel, the Good News — that is to say, in
the reconciliation of the sinner with God, by
faith in the love of a pardoning Father.

4th October 1873 (Geneva).—I have been
dreaming a long while in the moonlight,
which floods my room with a radiance, full

158 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

of vague mystery. The state of mind in-
duced in us by this fantastic light is itself
so dim and ghost-like that analysis loses its
way in it, and arrives at nothing articulate.
It is something indefinite and intangible,
like the noise of waves which is made up of
a thousand fused and mingled sounds. Itis
the reverberation of all the unsatisfied de-
sires of the soul, of all the stifled sorrows of
the heart, mingling in a vague sonorous
whole, and dying away in cloudy murmurs.
All those imperceptible regrets, which never
individually reach the consciousness, accu-
mulate at last into a definite result; they
become the voice of a feeling of emptiness
and aspiration; their tone is melancholy
itself. In youth the tone of these /Zolian
vibrations of the heart is all hope —a proof
that these thousands of indistinguishable
accents make up indeed the fundamental
note of our being, and reveal the tone of our
whole situation. Tell me what you feel in
your solitary room when the full moon is
shining in upon you and your lamp is dying
out, and I will tell you how old you are,
and I ror know if be are > happy:

Pee “best path isonet ‘life is the high
| road, which initiates us at the right moment

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 159

into all experience. Exceptional itineraries
are suspicious, and matter for anxiety.
What is normal is at once most convenient,
most honest, and most wholesome. Cross
roads may tempt us for one reason or
another, but it is very seldom that we do
not come to regret having taken them.

Each man begins the world afresh, and
not one fault of the first man has been
avoided by his remotest descendant. The
collective experience of the race accumu-
lates, but individual experience dies with
the individual, and the result is that insti-
tutions become wiser and knowledge as
such increases; but the young man, al-
though more cultivated, is just as presumpt-
uous, and not less fallible to-day than he
ever was. So that absolutely there is prog-
ress, and relatively there is none. Cir-
cumstances improve, but merit remains the
same. The whole is better, perhaps, but
man is not positively better —he is only
different. His defects and his virtues
change their form, but the total balance
does not show him to be the richer. A
thousand things advance, nine hundred and
ninety-eight fall back: this is progress.
There is nothing in it to be proud of, but
something, after ali, to console one.

160 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

4th February 1874. —I am still reading
the Origines du Christianisme by Ernest
Havet.* I like the book and I dislike it.
I like it for its independence and courage ;
I dislike it for the insufficiency of its funda-
mental ideas, and the imperfection of its
categories.

The author, for instance, has no clear
idea of religion; and his philosophy of
history is superficial. He is a Jacobin.
‘The Republic and Free Thought’ — he
cannot get beyond that. This curt and
narrow school of opinion is the refuge of
men of independent mind, who have been
scandalised by the colossal fraud of ultra-
montanism ; but it leads rather to cursing
history than to understanding it. It is the
criticism of the eighteenth century, of which
the general result is purely negative. But
Voltairianism is only the half of the philo-
sophic mind. Hegel frees thought in a very
different way.

Havet, too, makes another mistake. He
regards Christianity as synonymous with
Roman Catholicism and with the Church.
I know very well that the Roman Church
does the same, and that with her the as-
similation is a matter of sound tactics ;
but scientifically it is inexact. We ought

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 161

not even to identify Christianity with the
Gospel, nor the Gospel with religion in
general. It is the business of critical pre-
cision to clear away these perpetual con-
fusions in which Christian practice and
Christian preaching abound. To disen-
tangle ideas, to distinguish and limit them,
to fit them into their true place and order,
is the first duty of science whenever it lays
hands upon such chaotic and complex
things as manners, idioms, or beliefs. En-
tanglement is the condition of life ; order
and clearness are the signs of serious and
successful thought.

Formerly it was the ideas of nature which
were a tissue of errors and incoherent
fancies ; now it is the turn of moral and
psychological ideas. The best issue from
the present Babel would be the formation
or the sketching out of a truly scientific
science of man.

16th February 1874.— The multitude,
who already possess force, and even, accord-
ing to the Republican view, right, have
always been persuaded by the Cleons
of the day that enlightenment, wisdom,
thought, and reason, are also theirs. The
game of these conjurors and quacks of

162 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

universal suffrage has always been to flatter
the crowd in order to make an instrument
of it. They pretend to adore the puppet
of which they pull the threads.

The theory of radicalism is a piece of
juggling, for it supposes premisses of which
it knows the falsity: it manufactures the
oracle whose revelations it pretends to
adore; it proclaims that the multitude
creates a brain for itself, while all the time
it is the clever man who is the brain of the
multitude, and suggests to it what it is
supposed to invent. To reign by flattery
has been the common practice of the
courtiers of all despotisms, the favourites
of all tyrants ; it is an old and trite method,
but none the less odious for that. ;

The honest politician should worship
nothing but reason and justice, and it is
his business to preach them to the masses,
who represent, on an average, the age of
childhood and not that of maturity. We
corrupt childhood if we tell it that it cannot
be mistaken, and that it knows more than
its elders. We corrupt the masses when
we tell them that they are wise and far-
seeing and possess the gift of infallibility.

It is one of Montesquieu’s subtle remarks,
that the more wise men you heap together

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 163

the less wisdom you will obtain. Radical-
ism pretends that the greater number of
illiterate, passionate, thoughtless — above
all, young people, you heap together, the
greater will be the enlightenment resulting.
The second thesis is no doubt the repartee
to the first, but the joke isa bad one. All
that can be got from a crowd is instinct or
passion ; the instinct may be good, but the
passion may be bad, and neither is the
instinct capable of producing a clear idea,
nor the passion of leading to a just resolu-
tion.

A crowd is a material force, and the
support of numbers gives a proposition the
force of law; but that wise and ripened
temper of mind which takes everything
into account, and therefore tends to truth,
is never engendered by the impetuosity of
the masses. The masses are the material
of democracy, but its form —that is to say,
the laws which express the general reason,
justice, and utility—can only be rightly
shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a
universal property. The fundamental error
of the radical theory is to confound the
right to do good with good itself, and uni-
versal suffrage with universal wisdom. It
rests upon a legal fiction, which assumes a

164 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

real equality of enlightenment and merit
among those whom it declares electors. It
is quite possible, however, that these electors
may not desire the public good, and that
even if they do, they may be deceived as to
the manner of realising it. Universal suf-
frage is not a dogma — it is an instrument ;
and according to the population in whose
hands it is placed, the instrument is ser-
viceable or deadly to the proprietor.

27th February 1874. — Among the peoples,
in whom the social gifts are strongest, the
individual fears ridicule above all things,
and ridicule is the certain result of origi-
nality. No one, therefore, wishes to make a
party of his own; every one wishes to be
on the side of all the world. ‘All the
world’ is the greatest of powers; it is sov-
ereign, and calls itself we. We dress, we
dine, we walk, we go out, we come in, like
this, and not like that. This we is always
right, whatever it does. The subjects of We
are more prostrate than the slaves of the
East before the Padishah. The good-pleas-
ure of the sovereign decides every appeal ;
his caprice is law. What we does or says
is called custom, what it thinks is called
opinion, what it believes to be beautiful or

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 165

good is called fashion. Among such na-
tions as these we is the brain, the con-
science, the reason, the taste, and the
judgment of all. The individual finds
everything decided for him without his
troubling about it. He is dispensed from
the task of finding out anything whatever.
Provided that he imitates, copies, and re-
peats the models furnished by we, he has
nothing more to fear. He knows all that
he need know, and has entered into sal-
vation.

29th April 1874.— Strange reminiscence !
At the end of the terrace of La Treille, on
the eastern side, as I looked down the slope,
it seemed to me that I saw once more in
imagination a little path which existed there
when I was a child, and ran through the
bushy underwood, which was thicker then
than it is now. It is at least forty years
since this impression disappeared from my
mind. The revival of an image so dead
and so forgotten set me thinking. Con-
sciousness seems to be like a book, in which
the leaves turned by life successively cover
and hide each other in spite of their semi-
transparency ; but although the book may
be open at the page of the present, the

166 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

wind, for a few seconds, may blow back
the first pages into view.

And at death will these leaves cease to
hide each other, and shall we see all our
past at once? Is death the passage from
the successive to the simultaneous — that
is to say, from time to eternity ? Shall we
then understand, in its unity, the poem or
mysterious episode of our existence, which
till then we have spelled out phrase by
phrase? And is this the secret of that
glory which so often enwraps the brow and
countenance of those who are newly dead ?
. If so, death would be like the arrival of a
traveller at the top of a great mountain,
whence he sees spread out before him the
whole configuration of the country, of which
till then he had had but passing glimpses.
To be able to overlook one’s own history,
to divine its meaning in the general concert
and in the divine plan, would be the begin-
ning of eternal felicity. Till then we had
sacrificed ourselves to the universal order,
but then we should understand and appre-
ciate the beauty of that order. We had
toiled and laboured under the conductor of
the orchestra ; and we should find ourselves
become surprised and delighted hearers.
We had seen nothing but our own little

AMIEL’S JOURNAL, 167

path in the mist; and suddenly a mar-
vellous panorama and boundless distances
would open before our dazzled eyes. Why
not ?

31st May 1874. —I have been reading the
philosophical poems of Madame Ackermann.
She has rendered in fine verse that sense of
desolation which has been so often stirred
in me by the philoscphy of Schopenhauer,
of Hartmann, Comte, and Darwin. What
tragic force and power! What thought
and passion! She has courage for every-
thing, and attacks the most tremendous
subjects.

Science is implacable ; will it suppress all
religions ? All those which start from a
false conception of nature, certainly. But
if the scientific conception of nature proves
incapable of bringing harmony and peace to
man, what will happen ? Despair is not a
durable situation. We shall have to build
a moral city without God, without an
immortality of the soul, without hope.
Buddhism and Stoicism present themselves
as possible alternatives.

But even if we suppose that there is no
finality in the cosmos, it is certain that man
has ends at which he aims, and if so the

168 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

notion of end or purpose is a real phe.
nomenon, although a limited one. Physical
science may very well be limited by moral
science, and vice versa. But if these two
conceptions of the world are in opposition,
which must give way ?

I still incline to believe that nature is the
virtuality of mind, —that the soul is the
fruit of life, and liberty the flower of ne-
cessity, —that all is bound together, and
that nothing can be done without. Our
modern philosophy has returned to the point
of view of the Ionians, the ¢verxoi, or nat-
uralist thinkers. But it will have to pass
once more through Plato and through Aris-
totle, through the philosophy of ‘ goodness’
and ‘ purpose,’ through the science of mind,

3d July 1874. — Rebellion against com-
mon sense is a piece of childishness of
which I am quite capable. But it does not
last long. —I am soon brought back to the
advantages and obligations of my situation ;
I return to a calmer self-consciousness. It
is disagreeable to me, no doubt, to realise
all that is hopelessly lost to me, all that is
now and will be for ever denied to me; but
I reckon up my privileges as well as my
losses, —I lay stress on what I have, and

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. ~ 169

not only on what I want. And so I escape
from that terrible dilemma of ‘all or noth-
ing,’ which for me always ends in the
- adoption of the second alternative. It
seems to me at such times that a man may
without shame content himself with being
some thing and some one —

*Nisi haut, nisibas...

These brusque lapses into the formless, in-
determinate state, are thé price of my
eritical faculty. All my former habits
become suddenly fluid ; it seems to me that
I am beginning life over again, and that all
my acquired capital has disappeared at a
stroke. I am for ever new-born; I am a
mind which has never taken to itself a body,
a country, an avocation, a sex, a species.
Am I even quite sure of being a man, a
European, an inhabitant of this earth? It
seems to me so easy to be something else,
that to be what I am appears to me a mere
piece of arbitrary choice. Icannot possibly
take an accidental structure-of which the
value is purely relative, seriously. When
once a man has touched the absolute, all
that might be other than what it is seems
to him indifferent. All these ants pursuing
their private ends excite his mirth. He

il

170 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

looks down from the moon upon his hovel ;
he beholds the earth from the heights of
the sun; he considers his life from the
point of view of the Hindoo pondering the
days of Brahma; he sees the finite from
the distance of the infinite, and thencefor-
ward the insignificance of all those things
which men hold to be important makes
effort ridiculous, passion burlesque, and
prejudice absurd.

Tth August 1874 (Clarens). — A day per-
fectly beautiful, luminous, limpid, brill-
iant.

I passed the morning in the churchyard ;
the ‘Oasis’ was delightful. Innumerable
sensations, sweet and serious, peaceful and
solemn, passed overme.... Around me
Russians, English, Swedes, Germans, were
sleeping their last sleep under the shadow
of the Cubly. The landscape was one vast
splendour; the woods were deep and mys-
terious, the roses full blown ; all round me
were butterflies—a noise of wings—the
murmur of birds. I caught glimpses.through
the trees of distant mists, of soaring moun-
tains, of the tender blue of the lake. ...
A little conjunction of things struck me.
Two ladies were tending and watering a

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 171

grave; two nurses were suckling their
children. This double protest against death
had something touching and poetical in it.
‘Sleep, you who are dead ; we, the living,
are thinking of you, or at least carrying on
the pilgrimage of the race !’ — such seemed
to me the words in my ear. It was clear to
me that the Oasis of Clarens is the spot in
which I should like to rest. Here I am
surrounded with memories; here death
is like a sleep —a sleep instinct with
hope.

Hope is not forbidden us, but peace and
submission are the essentials.

1st September 1874 (Clarens). — On wak-
ing it seemed to me that I was staring into
the future with wide startled eyes. Is it
indeed to me that these things apply ?
Incessant and growing humiliation, my
slavery becoming heavier, my circle of
action steadily narrower!... What is
hateful in my situation is that deliverance
ean never be hoped for, and that one misery
will succeed another in such a way as to
leave me no breathing space, not even in
the future, not even in hope. All possibili-
ties are closed to me, one by one. It is

172 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

difficult for the natural man to escape from
a dumb rage against inevitable agony.

Noon. — An indifferent nature? A
Satanic principle of things? A good and
just God? Three points of view. The
second is improbable and horrible. The
first appeals to our stoicism. My organic
combination has never been anything but
mediocre ; it has lasted as long as it could.
Every man has his turn, and all must sub-
mit. To die quickly is a privilege; I shall
die by inches. Well, submit. Rebellion
would be useless and senseless. After all,
I belong to the better-endowed half of
human-kind, and my lot is superior to the
average.

But the third point of view alone can
give joy. Only is it tenable? Js there a
particular Providence directing all the cir-
cumstances of our life, and therefore im-
posing all our trials upon us for educational
ends? Is this heroic faith compatible with
our actual knowledge of the laws of
nature? Scarcely. But what this faith
makes objective we may hold as subjective
truth. The moral being may moralise his
sufferings by using natural facts for his own
inner education. What he cannot change |

> asa6
AMIEL S JOURNAL. 173

he calls the will of God, and to will what
_ God wills brings him peace.

To nature both our continued existence
and our morality are equally indifferent.
But God, on the other hand, if God is,
desires our sanctification ; and if suffering
purifies us, then we may console ourselves
for suffering. This is what makes the
great advantage of the Christian faith; it
is the triumph over pain, the victory over
death. There is but one thing necessary —
death unto sin, the immolation of our self-
ish will, the filial sacrifice of our desires.
Evil consists in living for self— that is to
say, for one’s own vanity, pride, sensuality,
or even health. Righteousness consists in
willingly accepting one’s lot, in submitting
to and espousing the destiny assigned us,
in willing what God commands, in renounc-
ing what He forbids us, in consenting to
what He takes from us or refuses us.

In my own particular case, what has
been taken from me is health —that is to
say, the surest basis of all independence ;
but friendship and material comfort are
still left to me; Iam neither called upon
to bear the slavery of poverty nor the hell
of absolute isolation.

Health cut off, means marriage, travel, |

174 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

study, and work forbidden or endangered.
It means life reduced in attractiveness and
utility by five-sixths.

Thy will be done!

14th September 1874 (Charnex).—A
long walk and conversation with ——. We
followed a high mountain path. Seated on
the turf, and talking with open heart, our
eyes wandered over the blue immensity
below us, and the smiling outlines of the
shore. All was friendly, azure-tinted, caress-
ing, to the sight. The soul I was reading
was profound and pure. Such an experi-
ence is like a flight into Paradise. —A few
light clouds climbed the broad spaces of
the sky, steamers made long tracks upon
the water at our feet, white sails were
dotted over the vast distance of the lake,
and sea-gulls like gigantic butterflies quiv-
ered above its rippling surface.

21st September 1874 (Charnex).—A
wonderful day! Never has the lake been
bluer, or the landscape softer. It was en-
chanting. — But tragedy is hidden under
the eclogue ; the serpent crawls under the
flowers. All the future is dark. The
phantoms which for three or four weeks I

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 175

have been able to keep at bay, wait for me
behind the door, as the Eumenides waited
for Orestes. Hemmed in on all sides !

‘On ne croit plus & son étoile,
On sent que derriére la toile
Sont le deuil, les maux et la mort.’

For a fortnight I have been happy, and
now this happiness is going.

There are no more birds, but a few white
or blue butterflies are still left. Flowers
are becoming rare—a few daisies in the
fields, some blue or yellow chicories and
colchicums, some wild geraniums growing
among fragments of old walls, and the
brown berries of the privet — this is all we
were able to find. In the fields they are
digging potatoes, beating down the nuts,
and beginning the apple harvest. The leaves
are thinning and changing colour ; I watch
them turning red on the pear-trees, gray
on the plums, yellow on the walnut-trees,
and tinging the thickly-strewn turf with
shades of reddish-brown. We are nearing
the end of the fine weather ; the colouring
is the colouring of late autumn ; there is no
need now to keep out of the sun. Every-
thing is soberer, more measured, more fugi-
tive, less emphatic. Energy is gone, youth

176 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

is past, prodigality at an end, the summer
over. The year is on the wane and tends
towards winter; it is once more in har-
mony with my own age and position, and
next Sunday it will keep my birthday.
All these different consonances form a
melancholy harmony.

The distinguishing mark of religion is
not so much liberty as obedience, and its
value is measured by the sacrifices which
it can extract from the individual.

A young girl’s love is a kind of piety.
We must approach it with adoration if we
are not to profane it, and with poetry if we
are to understand it. If there is anything
in the world which gives us a sweet, in-
effable impression of the ideal, it is this
trembling modest love. To deceive it
would be a crime. Merely to watch its
unfolding life is bliss to the beholder; he
sees in it the birth of a divine marvel.
When the garland of youth fades on our
brow, let us try at least to have the virtues
of maturity ; may we grow better, gentler,
graver, like the fruit of the vine, while its
leaf withers and falls.

. . . . . .

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 177

To know how to grow old is the master-
work of wisdom, and one of the most diffi-
cult chapters in the great art of living.

He who asks of life nothing but the
~ improvement of his own nature, and a con-
tinuous moral progress towards inward
contentment and religious submission, is
less liable than any one else to miss and
waste life.

2d January 1875 (Hyéres). — In spite of
my sleeping-draught I have had a bad
night. Once it seemed as if I must choke,
for I could breathe neither way.

Could I be more fragile, more sensitive,
more vulnerable! People talk to me as if
there were still a career before me, while
all the time I know that the ground is
slipping from under me, and that the
defence of my health is already a hopeless
task. At bottom, I am only living on out
of complaisance and without a shadow of
self-delusion. I know that not one of my
desires will be realised, and for a long time
I have had no desires at all. I simply
accept what comes to me as though it were
a bird perching on my window. I smile at
it, but I know very well that my visi-

178 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

tor has wings and will not stay long. The
resignation which comes from despair has
a kind of melancholy sweetness. It looks
at life as a man sees it from his death-bed,
and judges it without bitterness and with-
out vain regrets.

I no longer hope to get well, or to be use-
ful, orto be happy. I hope that those who
have loved me will love me to the end; I
should wish to have done them some good,
and to leave them a tender memory of my-
self. I wish to die without rebellion and
without weakness ; that is about all. Is
this relic of hope and of desire still too
much? Let all be as God will. I resign
myself into His hands.

22d January 1875 (Hyéres).— The French
mind, according to Gioberti, apprehends
only the outward form of truth, and exag-
gerates it by isolating it, so that it acts as
a solvent upon the realities with which it
works. It takes the shadow for the sub-
stance, the word for the thing, appearance
_ for reality, and abstract formula for truth.
It lives in a world of intellectual assignats.
If you talk to a Frenchman of art, of lan-
guage, of religion, of the state, of duty, of
the family, you feel in his way of speaking

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 179

that his thought remains outside the sub-
ject, that he never penetrates into its sub-
stance, its inmost core. He is not striving
to understand it in its essence, but only to
say something plausible about it. On his
‘lips the noblest words become thin and
empty ; for example, — mind, idea, religion.
The French mind is superficial and yet not
comprehensive ; it has an extraordinarily
fine edge, and yet no penetrating power.
Its desire is to enjoy its own resources by
the help of things, but it has none of the
respect, the disinterestedness, the patience,
and the self-forgetfulness, which are indis-
pensable if we wish to see things as they
are. Far from being the philosophic mind,
it is a mere counterfeit of it, for it does not
enable a man to solve any problem what-
ever, and remains incapable of understand-
ing all that is living, complex, and concrete.
Abstraction is its original sin, presumption
its incurable defect, and plausibility its
fatal limit.

The French language has no power of
expressing truths of birth and germination ;
it paints effects, results, the caput mortuum,
but not the cause, the motive power, the
native force, the development of any phe-
nomenon whatever. It is analytic and

180 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

descriptive, but it explains nothing, for it

/ avoids all beginnings and processes of for-
mation. With it crystallisation is not the

mysterious act itself by which a substance
passes from the fluid state to the solid
state. It is the product of that act.

The thirst for truth is not a French pas-
sion. In everything appearance is pre-
ferred to reality, the outside to the inside,
the fashion to the material, that which
shines to that which profits, opinion to
conscience. That is to say, the French-
man’s centre of gravity is always outside
him, —he is always thinking of others, play-
ing to the gallery. To him individuals are

' go many zeros; the unit which turns them

into a number must be added from outside ;
it may be royalty, the writer of the day,
the favourite newspaper, or any other

, temporary master of fashion. — All this is

probably the result of an exaggerated
sociability, which weakens the soul’s forces

/ of resistance, destroys its capacity for in-

vestigation and personal conviction, and
kills in it the worship of the ideal. -

27th January 1875 (Hyéres). — The
whole atmosphere has a luminous serenity,
a limpid clearness. The islands are like

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 181

I

swans swimming in a golden stream.
Peace, splendour, boundless space!. .
And I meanwhile look quietly on while the
soft hours glide away. I long to catch the
wild bird, happiness, and tame it. Above
all, I long to share it with others. These
delicious mornings impress me indescriba-
bly. They intoxicate me, they carry me
away. I feel beguiled out of myself, ais
solved in sunbeams, breezes, perfumes, and.)
sudden impulses of joy. And yet all the/)
time I pine for I know not what intangible |
Eden.

Lamartine in the Préludes has admirably
described this oppressive effect of happiness
on fragile human nature. I suspect that
the reason for it is that the finite creature
feels itself invaded by the infinite, and the
invasion produces dizziness, a kind of ver-
tigo, a longing to fling oneself into the
great gulf of being. To feel life too in-
tensely is to yearn for death ; and for man,
to die means to become like unto the gods
—to be initiated into the great mystery.
Pathetic and beautiful illusion.

Ten o’clock in the evening. — From one
end to the other the day has been perfect,
and my walk this afternoon to Beau Vallon

.

182 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

was one long delight. It was like an expe-
dition into Arcadia. Here was a wild and
woodland corner, which would have made
a fit setting for a dance of nymphs, and
there an ilex overshadowing a rock, which
reminded me of an ode of Horace or a draw-
ing of Tibur. I felt a kind of certainty
that the landscape had much that was Greek
in it. And what made the sense of resem-
blance the more striking was the sea, which
one feels to be always near, though one
may not see it, and which any turn of the
valley may bring into view. We found out
a little tower with an overgrown garden, of
which the owner might have been taken for
a husbandman of the Odyssey. He could
scarcely speak any French, but was not
without a certain grave dignity. I trans-
lated to him the inscription on his sun-dial,
* Hora est benefaciendi,’ which is beautiful,
and pleased him greatly. It would be an
inspiring place to write a novelin. Only I
do not know whether the little den would
have a decent room, and one would cer-
tainly have to live upon eggs, milk, and
figs, like Philemon.

15th February 1875 (Hyéres). —I have
just been reading the two last Discouwrs at

r

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 183

the French Academy, lingering over every
word and weighing every idea. This kind
of writing is a sort of intellectual dainty,
for it is the art ‘of expressing truth with
all the courtesy and finesse possible ;’ the
art of appearing perfectly at ease without the
smallest loss of manners ; of being grace-
fully sincere, and of making criticism itself
a pleasure to the person criticised. — Leg-
acy as it is from the monarchical tradition,
this particular kind of eloquence is the dis-
tinguishing mark of those men of the world
who are also men of breeding, and those
men of letters who are also gentlemen.
Democracy could never have invented it,
and in this delicate genre of literature
France may give points to all rival peoples,
for it is the fruit of that refined and yet
vigorous social sense which produced by
court and drawing-room life, by literature
and good company, by means of a mutual
education continued for centuries. This
complicated product is as original in its way
as Athenian eloquence, but it is less healthy
and less durable. If ever France becomes
Americanised this genre at least will perish,
without hope of revival.

16th April 1875 (Hyéres). —I have al-

184 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

ready gone through the various emotions
of leave-taking. I have been wandering
slowly through the streets and up the castle
hill, gathering a harvest of images and
recollections. Already I am full of regret
that I have not made a better study of the
country, in which I have now spent four
months and more. It is like what happens
when a friend dies ; we accuse ourselves of
having loved him too little, or loved him ill ;
or it is like our own death, when we look
back upon life and feel that it has been mis-
spent.

16th August 1875. — Life is but a daily
oscillation between revolt and submission,
between the instinct of the ego, which is to
expand, to take delight in its own tranquil
sense of inviolability, if not to triumph in
its own sovereignty, and the instinct of the
soul, which is to obey the universal order,
to accept the will of God.

The cold renunciation of disillusioned
reason brings no real peace. Peace is only
to be found in reconciliation with destiny,
when destiny seems, in the religious sense
of the word, good; thatis to say, when man
feels himself directly in the presence of
God. Then, and then only, does the will

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 185

acquiesce. Nay more, it only completely
acquiesces when it adores. The soul only
submits to the hardness of fate by virtue of
its discovery of a sublime compensation —
the lovingkindness of the Almighty. That
is to say, it cannot resign itself to lack or
famine, it shrinks from the void around it,
and the happiness either of hope or faith is
essential to it. It may very well vary its
object, but some object it must have. It
may renounce its former idols, but it will
demand another cult. The soul hungers and
thirsts after happiness, and it is in vain that
everything deserts it, —it will never sub-
mit to its abandonment.

28th August 1875 (Geneva).— A word
used by Sainte-Beuve @ propos of Ben-
jamin Constant has struck me: it is the
word consideration. To possess or not to pos-
sess consideration was to Madame de Staél
a matter of supreme importance, — the loss
of it an irreparable evil, the acquirement of
it a pressing necessity. .What, then, is this
good thing? The esteem of the public.
And how is it gained? By honourable
character and life, combined with a certain
aggregate of services rendered and of suc-
cesses obtained. It is not exactly a good

186 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

conscience, but it is something like it, for it is
the witness from without, if not the witness
from within. Consideration is not reputa-
tion, still less celebrity, fame, or glory; it
has nothing to do with savoir faire, and is
not always the attendant of talent or genius.
It is the reward given to constancy in duty,
to probity of conduct. It is the homage
rendered to a life held to be irreproachable.
It is a little more than esteem, and a little
less than admiration. To enjoy public con-
sideration is at once a happiness and a
power. The loss of it is a misfortune and
a source of daily suffering. — Here am I, at
the age of fifty-three, without ever having
given this idea the smallest place in my
life. Itis curious, but the desire for con-
sideration has been to me so little of a mo-
tive that I have not even been conscious of
such an idea at all. The fact shows, I sup-
pose, that for me the audience, the gallery,
the public, has never had more than a nega-
tive importance. I have neither asked nor
expected anything from it, not even justice ;

| and to be a dependant upon it, to solicit its
_ suffrages and its good graces, has always
seemed to me an act of homage and flunk-
' eyism against which my pride has instine-

tively rebelled. I have never even tried to

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 187

gain the goodwill of a coterie or a newspaper,
nor so much as the vote of an elector.
And yet it would have been a joy to me to be
smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed,
and to obtain what I was so ready to give,
kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down
consideration and reputation,—to force
the esteem of others, seemed to me an
effort unworthy of myself, almost a degra-
dation. I have never even thought of it.
Perhaps I have lost consideration by my
indifference to it. Probably I have disap-
pointed public expectation by thus allowing
an over-sensitive and irritable consciousness
' to lead me into isolation and retreat. I
know that the world, which is only eager to
silence you when you do speak, is angry
with your silence as soon as its own action
has killed in you the wish to speak. No
doubt, to be silent with a perfectly clear
conscience a man must not hold a public
office. I now indeed say to myself that a
professor is morally bound to justify his
position by publication; that students,
authorities, and public are placed thereby
in a healthier relation towards him ; that it
is necessary for his good repute in the
world, and for the proper maintenance of
his position. But this point of view has

188 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

not been a familiar one to me. I have en-
deavoured to give conscientious lectures,
and I have discharged all the subsidiary
duties of my post to the best of my ability ;
but I have never been able to bend myself
to a struggle with hostile opinion, for all
the while my heart has been full of sadness
and disappointment, and I have known and
felt that I have been systematically and de-
liberately isolated. Premature despair and
the deepest discouragement have been my
constant portion. Incapable of taking any
interest in my talents for my own sake, I
let everything slip as soon as the hope of
being loved for them and by them had for-
saken me. A hermit against my will, I
have not even found peace in solitude, be-
cause my inmost conscience has not been
any better satisfied than my heart.

Does not all this make up a melancholy
lot, a barren failure of a life? What use
have I made of my gifts, of my special cir-
cumstances, of my half-century of exist-
ence? What have I paid back to my
country ? Are all the documents L have
produced, taken together, my correspond-
ence, these thousands of journal pages, my
lectures, my articles, my poems, my notes
~f different kinds, anything better than

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 189

withered leaves? To whom and to what
have I been useful? Will my name sur-
vive me a single day, and will it ever mean
anything to anybody ?—A life of no ac-
count! A great many comings and goings,
a great many scrawls, — for nothing. When

all is added up, — nothing! And worst of ‘

all, it has not been a life used up in the ser-
vice of some adored object, or sacrificed to
any future hope. Its sufferings will have
been vain, its renunciations useless, its sac-
rifices gratuitous, its dreariness without re-
ward. ... No, lam wrong; it will have
had its secret treasure, its sweetness, its
reward. It will have inspired a few affec-
tions of great price ; it will have given joy
to a few souls; its hidden existence will
have had some value. Besides, if in itself
it has been nothing, it has understood
much. If it has not been in harmony with
the great order, still it has loved it. If it
has missed happiness and duty, it has at
least felt its own nothingness, and implored
its pardon.

Later on.— There is a great affinity in
me with the Hindoo genius—that mind,
vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy, and spec-
ulative, but destitute of ambition, personal-

~

190 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

ity, and will. Pantheistic disinterestedness,
the effacement of the self in the great
whole, womanish gentleness, a horror of
slaughter, antipathy to action, — these are
all present in my nature, in the nature at
least which has been developed by years
and circumstances. Still the West has also
had its part in me.— What I have found
difficult is to keep up a prejudice in favour
of any form, nationality, or individuality
whatever. Hence my indifference to my
own person, my own usefulness, interest,
or opinions of the moment. What does it
all matter? Omnis determinatio est nega-
tio. Grief localises us, love particularises
us, but thought delivers us from personal-
ity. ... Tobe aman is a poor thing, to
be a man is well; to be the man—man in
essence and in principle —that alone is to
be desired.

Yes, but in these Brahmanic aspirations
what becomes of the subordination of the
individual to duty? Pleasure may lie in
ceasing to be individual, but duty lies in
performing the microscopic task allotted to
us. The problem set before us is to bring
our daily task into the temple of contempla-
tion and ply it there, to act as in the presence
of God, to interfuse one’s little part with

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. Ig!

religion. So only can we inform the detail
of life, all that is passing, temporary, and
insignificant, with beauty and nobility. So
may we dignify and consecrate the meanest
of occupations. So may we feel that we
are paying our tribute to-the universal work
and the eternal will. So are we recon-
ciled with life and delivered from the fear
of death. So are we in order and at
peace.

1st September 1875. —I have been work-
ing for some hours at my article on Mme.
de Staél, but with what labour, what pain-
ful effort! When I write for publication
every word is misery, and my pen stumbles
at every line, so anxious am I to find the
ideally best expression, and so great is the
number of possibilities which open before
me at every step.

Composition demands a concentration,
decision, and pliancy which I no longer pos-
sess. I cannot fuse together materials and
ideas. If we are to give anything a form,
we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it.16
We must treat our subject brutally, and
not be always trembling lest we are doing
ita wrong. We must be able to transmute
and absorb it into our own substance. This

192 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

sort of confident effrontery is beyond me:
my whole nature tends to that impersonal-
ity which respects and subordinates itself
to the object; it is love of truth which
holds me back from concluding and decid-
ing. — And then I am always retracing my
steps: instead of going forwards I work in
a circle: Iam afraid of having forgotten a
point, of having exaggerated an expression,
of having used a word out of place, while
all the time I ought to have been thinking
of essentials and aiming at breadth of treat-
ment. Ido not know how to sacrifice any-
thing, how to give up anything whatever.
Hurtful timidity, unprofitable conscien-
tiousness, fatal slavery to detail !

In reality I have never given much
thought to the art of writing, to the best
way of making an article, an essay, a book,
nor have I ever methodically undergone
the writer’s apprenticeship ; it would have
been useful to me, and I was always
ashamed of what was useful. I have felt,
as it were, a scruple against trying to sur-
prise the secret of the masters of literature,
against picking chef-d’euvres to pieces.
When I think that I have always postponed
the serious study of the art of writing, from
a sort of awe of it, and a secret love of its

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 193

beauty, I am furious with my own stupid-
ity, and with my own respect. Practice
and routine would have given me that ease,
lightness, and assurance, without which the
natural gift and impulse dies away. But
on the contrary, I have developed ‘two
opposed habits of mind, the habit of scien-
tific analysis which exhausts the material
offered to it, and the habit of immediate
notation of passing impressions. The art of
composition lies between the two ; you want
for it both the living unity of the thing,
and the sustained operation of thought.

25th October 1875.—I have been listen-
ing to M. Taine’s first lecture (on the Ancien
Régime) delivered in the University hall.
It was an extremely substantial piece of
work — clear, instructive, compact, and full
of matter. As a writer he shows great
skill in the French method of simplifying
his subject by massing it in large striking
divisions ; his great defect is a constant
straining after points; his principal merit
is the sense he has of historical reality, his
desire to see things as they are. For the
rest, he has extreme openness of mind,
freedom of thought, and precision of lan-
guage. — The hall was crowded.

194 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

26th October 1875. — All origins are
secret ; the principle of every individual or
collective life is a mystery — that is to say,
something irrational, inexplicable, not to
be defined. We may even go farther and
say;— Every individuality is an insoluble
enigma, and no beginning explains it. In
fact, all that has become may be explained
retrospectively, but the beginning of any-
thing whatever did not become. It repre-
sents always the ‘jiat lux,’ the initial
miracle, the act of creation; for it is the
consequence of nothing else, it simply ap-
pears among anterior things which make a
milieu, an occasion, a surrounding for it,
but which are witnesses of its appearance
without understanding whence it comes.

Perhaps also there are no true individu-
als, and, if so, no beginning but one only,
the primordial impulse, the first movement.
All men on this hypothesis would be but
man in two sexes; man again might be
reduced to the animal, the animal to the
plant, and the only individuality left would
be a living nature, reduced to a living’ mat-
ter, to the hylozoism of Thales. However,
even upon this hypothesis, if there were but
one absolute beginning, relative beginnings
would still remain to us as multiple sym-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 195

bols of the absolute. Every life, called
individual for convenience’ sake and by
analogy, would represent in miniature the
history of the world, and would be to the
eye of the philosopher a microscopic com-
pendium of it.

The history of the formation of ideas is
what frees the mind.

A philosophic truth does not become
popular until some eloquent soul has
humanised it or some gifted personality has
translated and embodied it. Pure truth
cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it
must be communicated by contagion.

30th January 1876.— After dinner I
went two steps off, to Marc Monnier’s, to
hear the Luthier de Crémone, a one-act
comedy in verse, read by the author, Fran-
gois Coppée.

It was a feast of fine sensations, of liter-
ary dainties. For the little piece is a pearl.
It is steeped in poetry, and every line is a
fresh pleasure to one’s taste.

This young maestro is like the violin he
writes about, vibrating and passionate ; he
has, besides delicacy, point, grace, all that

196 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

a writer wants to make what is simple,
naive, heartfelt, and out of the beaten
track, acceptable to a cultivated society.

How to return to nature through art:
there is the problem of all highly composite
literatures like our own. Rousseau himself
attacked letters with all the resources of the
art of writing, and boasted the delights of
savage life with a skill and adroitness de-
veloped only by the most advanced civilisa-
tion. And it is indeed this marriage of
contraries which charms us; this spiced
gentleness, this learned innocence, this cal-
culated simplicity, this yes and no, this
foolish wisdom. It is the supreme irony of
such combinations which tickles the taste
of advanced and artificial epochs, epochs
when men ask for two sensations at. once,
like the contrary meanings fused by the
smile of La Gioconda. And our satisfac-
tion too in work of this kind is best ex-
pressed by that ambiguous curve of the lip
which says: —I feel your charm, but I am
not your dupe ; I see the illusion both from
within and from without; I yield to you,
but I understand you; I am complaisant,
but Iam proud; I am open to sensations,
‘yet not the slave of any; you have talent,
I have subtlety of perception ; we are quits,
and we understand each other.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 197

1st February 1876.—This evening we
talked of the infinitely great and the
infinitely small. The great things of the
universe are for —— so much easier to
understand than the small, because all
greatness is a multiple of herself, whereas
she is incapable of analysing what requires
a different sort of measurement.

It is possible for the thinking being to
place himself in all points of view, and to
teach his soul to live under the most differ-
ent modes of being. But it must be con-
fessed that very few profit by the possibility.
Men are in general imprisoned, held in a
vice by their circumstances almost as the
animals are, but they have very little
suspicion of it because they have so little
faculty of self-judgment. It is only the
critic and the philosopher who can pene-
trate into all states of being, and realise
their life from within.

When the imagination shrinks in fear
from the phantoms which it creates, it may
be excused because it is imagination. But
when the intellect allows itself to be tyran-
nised over or terrified by the categories to '
which itself gives birth, it is in the wrong,
for it is not allowed to intellect, — the critical
power of man, — to be the dupe of anything.

198 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Now, in the superstition of size the mind
is merely the dupe of itself, for it creates
the notion of space. The created is not
more than the creator, the son not more
than the father. The point of view wants
rectifying. The mind has to free itself
from space, which gives it a false notion of
itself, but it can only attain this freedom
by reversing things and by learning to see
space in the mind instead of the mind in
space. How can it do this? Simply by
reducing space to its virtuality. Space is
dispersion ; mind is concentration.

And that is why God is present every-
where, without taking up a thousand
millions of cube leagues, nor a hundred
times more nor a hundred times less.

In the state of thought the universe occu-
pies but a single point; but in the state of
dispersion and analysis this thought re-
quires the heaven of heavens for its expan-
sion.

In the same way, time and number are
contained in the mind. Man, as mind, is
not their inferior, but their superior. ~

It is true that before he can reach this
state of freedom his own body must appear
to him at will either speck or world —that
is to say, he must be independent of it. So

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 199

long as the self still feels itself spatial, dis-
persed, corporeal, it is but a soul, it is not
a mind ; it is conscious of itself only as the
animal is, the impressionable, affectionate,
active and restless animal.

The mind being the subject of phenomena
cannot be itself phenomenal ; the mirror of
an image, if it was an image, could not be
amirror. There can be no echo without a
noise. Consciousness means some one who
experiences something. And all the some-
things together cannot take the place of the
some one. The phenomenon exists only for
a point which is not itself, and for which it
is an object. The perceptible supposes the
perceiver.

15th May 1876.—This morning I cor-
rected the proofs of the Etrangéres.* Here
at least is one thing off my hands. The
piece of prose theorising which ends the
volume pleased and satisfied me a good
deal more than my new metres. The book,
as a whole, may be regarded as an attempt
to solve the problem of French verse-trans-
lation considered as.a special art. It is
science applied to poetry. It ought not, I

* Les Etrangéres : Poésies traduites de diverses
littératures, par H. F. Amiel, 1876.

200 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

think, to do any discredit to a philosopher,
for, after all, it is nothing but applied psy-
chology.

Do I feel any relief, any joy, pride, hope ?
Hardly. It seems to me that I feel nothing
at all, or at least my feeling is so vague
and doubtful that I cannot analyse it. On
the whole, I am rather tempted to say to -
myself, how much labour for how small a
result, — Much ado about nothing! And
yet the work in itself is good, is successful.
But what does verse-translation matter ?
Already my interest in it is fading; my
mind and my energies clamour for some-
thing else.

What will Edmond Scherer say to the
volume ?

To the inmost self of me this literary
attempt is quite indifferent, —a Lilliputian
affair. In comparing my work with other
work of the same kind, I find a sort of rela-
tive satisfaction ; but I see the intrinsic futil-
ity of it, and the insignificance of its success
or failure. I do not believe in the public;
I do not believe in my own work; I have
no ambition, properly speaking, and I blow
soap-bubbles for want of something to do.

‘Car le néant peut seul bien cacher l’infini.’

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 201

Self-satire, disillusion, absence of preju-
dice, may be freedom, but they are not
strength.

12th July 1876.— Trouble on - trouble.
My cough has been worse than ever. I
cannot see that the fine weather or the
holidays have made any change for the
better in my state of health. On the con-
trary, the process of demolition seems more
rapid. It is a painful experience, this pre-
mature decay! ... ‘Aprés tant de mal-
heurs, que vous reste-t-il? Moi.’ This
‘moi’ is the central consciousness, the
trunk of all the branches which have been
cut away, that which bears every successive
mutilation. Soon I shall have nothing else
left than bare intellect. Death reduces us
to the mathematical ‘point’; the destruc-
tion which precedes it. forces us back, as it
were, by a series of ever-narrowing concen-
tric circles to this last inaccessible refuge.
Already I have a foretaste of that zero in
which all forms and all modes are extin-
guished. I see how we return into the
night, and inversely I understand how we
issue from it. Life is but a meteor, of
which the whole brief course is before me.
Birth, life, death assume a fresh meaning

202 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

to us at each phase of our existence. To
see oneself as a firework in the darkness —
to become a witness of one’s own fugitive
phenomenon — this is practical psychology.
I prefer indeed the spectacle of the world,
which is a vaster and more splendid fire-
work ; but when illness narrows my horizon
and makes me dwell perforce upon my own
miseries, these miseries are still capable of
supplying food for my psychological curi-
osity. What interests me in myself, in
spite of my repulsions, is that I find in my
own case a genuine example of human
nature, and therefore a specimen of general
value. The sample enables me to under-
stand a multitude of similar situations, and
numbers of my fellow-men.

To enter consciously into all possible
modes of being would be sufficient occupa-
tion for hundreds of centuries — at least for
our finite intelligences, which are condi-
tioned by time. The progressive happiness
of the process, indeed, may be easily poi-
soned and embittered by the ambition which
asks for everything at once, and clamours
to reach the absolute at a bound. But it
may be answered that aspirations are nec~
essarily prophetic, for they could only have
come into being under the action of the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 203

same cause which will enable them to reach
their goal. The soul can only imagine the
absolute because the absolute exists; our
consciousness of a possible perfection is
the guarantee that perfection will be real-
ised.

Thought itself is eternal. It is the con-
sciousness of thought which is gradually
achieved through the long succession of
ages, races, and humanities. Such is the
doctrine of Hegel. The history of the mind
is, according to him, one of approximation
to the absolute, and the absolute differs at
the two ends of the story. It was at the
beginning: it knows itself at the end. Or
rather it advances in the possession of itself
with the gradual unfolding of creation.
Such also was the conception of Aristotle.

If the history of the mind and of con-
sciousness is the very marrow and essence
of being, then to be driven back on psychol-
ogy, even personal psychology, is to be still
occupied with the main question of things,
to keep to the subject, to feel oneself in the
centre of the universal drama. There is
comfort in the idea. Everything else may
be taken away from us, but if thought re-
mains we are still connected by a magic
thread with the axis of the world. But we

204 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

may lose thought and speech, Then noth-
ing remains but simple feeling, the sense of
the presence of God and of death in God, —
the last relic of the human privilege, which
is to participate in the whole, to commune
with the absolute.

‘Ta vie est un éclair qui meurt dans son
nuage,
Mais ]’éclair t’a sauvé s’il t’a fait voir le ciel.’

26th July 1876.— A private journal is a
friend to idleness. It frees us from the
necessity of looking all round a subject, it
puts up with every kind of repetition, it
accompanies all the caprices and meander-
ings of the inner life, and proposes to itself
no definite end. This journal of mine rep-
resents the material of a good many vol-
umes: what prodigious waste of time; of
thought, of strength! It will be useful to
nobody, and even for myself,—it has
rather helped me to shirk life than to prac-
tise it. A journal takes the place of a con-
fidant, that is, of friend or wife ; it becomes
a substitute for production, a substitute for
country and public. It is a grief-cheating
device, a mode of escape and withdrawal ;
but, factotum as it is, though it takes the
place of everything, properly speaking it
represents nothing atall....

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 205

What is it which makes the history of a
soul? It is the stratification of its different
stages of progress, the story of its acquisi-
tions and of the general course of its des-
tiny. Before my history can teach any-
body anything, or even interest myself, it
must be disentangled from its materials,
distilled and simplified. These thousands
of pages are but the pile of leaves and bark
from which the essence has still to be ex-
tracted. A whole forest of cinchonas are
worth but one cask of quinine. A whole
Smyrna rose-garden goes to produce one
phial of perfume.

This mass of written talk, the work of
twenty-nine years, may in the end be
worth nothing at all; for each is only in-
terested in his own romance, his own indi-
vidual life. Even I perhaps shall never
have time to read them over myself. So—
so what? I shall have lived my life, and
life consists in repeating the human type,
and the burden of the human song, as
myriads of my kindred have done, are
doing, and will do, century after century.
To rise to consciousness of this burden and
this type is something, and we can scarcely
achieve anything further. The realisation
of the type is more complete, and the bur-

206 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

den a more joyous one, if circumstances
are kind and propitious, but whether the
puppets have done this or that —

‘ Trois p’tits tours et puis s’en vont !’

everything falls into the same gulf at last,
and comes to very much the same thing.

To rebel against fate—to try to escape
the inevitable issue—is almost puerile.
When the duration of a centenarian and
that of an insect are quantities sensibly
equivalent, —and geology and astronomy
enable us to regard such durations from
this point of view, — what is the meaning
of all our tiny efforts and cries, the value of
our anger, our ambition, our hope? For
the dream of a dream it is absurd to raise
these make-believe tempests. The forty
millions of infusoria which make up a eube-
inch of chalk — do they matter much to us ?
and do the forty millions of men who make
up France matter any more to an inhabi-
tant of the moon or Jupiter ?

To be a conscious monad—a nothing
which knows itself to be the microscopic
phantom of the universe: this is all we can
ever attain to.

12th September 1876, — What is your own

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 207

particular absurdity ? Why, simply that you
exhaust yourself in trying to understand
wisdom without practising it, that you are
always making preparations for nothing,
that you live without living. Contempla-
tion which has not the courage to be purely
contemplative, renunciation which does not
renounce completely, chronic contradiction
—there is your case. Inconsistent scep-
ticism, irresolution, not convinced but incor-
rigible, weakness which will not accept itself
and cannot transform itself into strength —
there is your misery. The comic side of it
lies in capacity to direct others becoming in-
capacity to direct oneself, in the dream of
the infinitely great stopped short by the in-
finitely little, in what seems to be the utter
uselessness of talent. To arrive at immo-
bility by excess of motion, at zero from
abundance of numbers, is a strange farce,
a sad comedy; the poorest gossip can
laugh at its absurdity.

19th September 1876.— My reading to-day
has been Doudan’s Lettres et Mélanges.™"
A fascinating book! Wit, grace, subtlety,
imagination, thought, —these letters pos-
sess them all. How much I regret that I
never knew the man himself. He was a

208 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Frenchman of the best type, un delicat né
sublime, to quote Sainte-Beuve’s expres-
sion. Fastidiousness of temper, and a too
keen love of perfection, led him to with-
hold his talent from the public, but while
still living, and within his own circle, he
was the recognised equal of the best. He
scarcely lacked anything except that frac-
tion of ambition, of brutality and material
force which are necessary to success in this
world ; but he was appreciated by the best
society of Paris, and he cared for nothing
else. He reminds me of Joubert.

20th September.—To be witty is to
satisfy another’s wits by the bestowal on
him of two pleasures, that of understand-
ing one thing and that of guessing another,
and so achieving a double stroke.

Thus Doudan scarcely ever speaks out his
thought directly ; he disguises and suggests
it by imagery, allusion, hyperbole ; he over-
lays it with light irony and feigned anger,
with gentle mischief and assumed humility.
The more the thing to be guessed differs
from the thing said, the more pleasant sur-
prise there is for the interlocutor or the cor-
respondent concerned. These charming
and delicate ways of expression allow a

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 209

man to teach what he will without pedantry,
and to venture what he will without offence.
There is something Attic and aérial in
them; they mingle grave and gay, fiction
and truth, with a light grace of touch such
as neither La Fontaine nor Alcibiades would
have been ashamed of. Socratic badinage
like this presupposes a free and equal mind,
victorious over physical ill and inward dis-
contents. Such delicate playfulness is the
exclusive heritage of those rare natures in
whom subtlety is the disguise of superiority,
and taste its revelation. What balance of
faculties and cultivation it requires! What
personal distinction it shows! Perhaps
only a valetudinarian would have been
capable of this morbidezza of touch, this
marriage of virile thought and feminine
caprice. If there is excess anywhere, it
lies perhaps in a certain effeminacy of
sentiment. Doudan can put up with noth-
ing but what is perfect —nothing but what is
absolutely harmonious ; all that is rough,
harsh, powerful, brutal, and unexpected,
throws him into convulsions. Audacity —
boldness of all kinds—repels him. This
Athenian of the Roman time is a true disci-
ple of Epicurus in all matters of sight, hear-
ing, and intelligence — a crumpled rose-leaf
disturbs him.

210 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

‘Une ombre, un souffle, un rien, tout lui don-
nait la fiévre.’

What all this softness wants is strength,
creative and muscular force. His range is
not as wide as I thought it at first. The
classical world and the Renaissance — that
is to say, the horizon of La Fontaine —is
his horizon. He is out of his element in
the German or Slav literatures. He knows
nothing of Asia. Humanity for him is not
much larger than France, and he has never
made a bible of Nature. In music and
painting he is more or less exclusive. In
philosophy he stops at Kant. To sum up:
he is a man of exquisite and ingenious taste,
but he is not a first-rate critic, still less a
poet, philosopher, or artist. He was an ad-
mirable talker, a delightful letter-writer,
who might have become an author had he
chosen to concentrate himself. I must wait
for the second volume in order to review
and correct this preliminary impression.

Mid-day.—1I have now gone once more
through the whole volume, lingering over
the Attic charm of it, and meditating on
the originality and distinction of the man’s
organisation. Doudan was a keen pene-
trating psychologist, a diviner of aptitudes,

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 217

a trainer of minds, a man of infinite taste
and talent, capable of every nuance and of
every delicacy ; but his defect was a want
of persevering energy of thought, a lack of
patience in execution. Timidity, unworld-
liness, indolence, indifference, confined him
to the réle of the literary counsellor and
made him judge of the field in which he
ought rather to have fought. But do I
mean to blame him ?—no indeed! In the
first place, it would be to fire on my allies ;
in the second, very likely he chose the
better part.

Was it not Goethe who remarked that in
the neighbourhood of all famous men we
find men who never achieve fame, and yet
were esteemed by those who did, as their
equals or superiors? Descartes, I think,
said the same thing. Fame will not run
after the men who are afraid of her. She
makes mock of those trembling and respect-
ful lovers who deserve but cannot force her
favours. The public is won by the bold,
imperious talents — by the enterprising and
the skilful. It does not believe in modesty,
which it regards as a device of impotence.
The golden book contains but a section of
the true geniuses; it names those only who
have taken glory by storm.

212 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

15th November 1876. —I have been read-
ing L’ Avenir Religieux des Peuples Civi- .
lisés, by Emile de Laveleye. The theory
of this writer is that the Gospel, in its pure
form, is capable of providing the religion of
the future, and that the abolition of all
religious principle, which is what the social-
ism of the present moment demands, is as
much to be feared as Catholic superstition.
The Protestant method, according to him,
is the means of transition whereby sacer-
dotal Christianity passes into the pure re-
ligion of the Gospel. Laveleye does not
think that civilisation can last without the
belief in God and in another life. Perhaps
he forgets that Japan and China prove the
contrary. But it is enough to determine
him against Atheism if it can be shown
that a general Atheism would bring about
a lowering of the moral average. After all,
however, this is nothing but a religion of
utilitarianism. A belief is not true because
it is useful. And it is truth alone —scien-
tific, established, proved, and rational truth
—which is capable of satisfying nowadays
the awakened minds of all classes. We
may still say perhaps, ‘faith governs the
world,’ — but the faith of the present is no
longer in revelation or in the priest —it is

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 213

in reason and in science. Is there a science
of goodness and happiness ?— that is the
question. Do justice and goodness depend
upon any particular religion? How are
men to be made free, honest, just, and
good ? —there is the point.

On my way through the book I perceived
many new applications of my law of irony.
Every epoch has two contradictory aspi-
rations which are logically antagonistic
and practically associated. Thus the philo-
sophic materialism of the last century was
the champion of liberty. And at the pres-
ent moment we find Darwinians in love with
equality, while Darwinism itself is based on
the right of the stronger. Absurdity is
interwoven with life: real beings are ani-
mated contradictions, absurdities brought
into action. Harmony with self would
mean peace, repose, and perhaps immo-
bility. By far the greater number of human
beings can only conceive action, or practise
it, under the form of war —a war of com-
petition at home, a bloody war of nations
abroad, and finally war with self. So that
life is a perpetual combat; it wills that
which it wills not, and wills not that it
wills. Hence what I call the law of irony
— that is to say, the refutation of the self by
itself, the concrete realisation of the absurd.

214 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Is such a result inevitable? I think not.
Struggle is the caricature of harmony, and
harmony, which is the association of con-
traries, is also a principle of movement.
War is a brutal and fierce means of pacifica-
tion ; it means the suppression of resistance
by the destruction or enslavement of the
conquered. Mutual respect would be a
better way out of difficulties. Conflict is
the result of the selfishness which will
acknowledge no other limit than that of
external force. The laws of animality
govern almost the whole of history. The
history of man is essentially zoological ; it
becomes human late in the day, and then
only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive
to justice, goodness, enthusiasm, and devo-
tion. The angel shows itself rarely and
with difficulty through the highly-organised
brute. The divine aureole plays only with
a dim and fugitive light around the brows
of the world’s governing race.

The Christian nations offer many illustra-
tions of the law of irony. They profess the
citizenship of heaven, the exclusive worship
of eternal good ; and never has the hungry
pursuit of perishable joys, the love of this
world, or the thirst for conquest, been
stronger or more active than among these

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 215

nations. Their official motto is exactly
the reverse of their real aspiration. Under
a false flag they play the smuggler with a
droll ease of conscience. Is the fraud a
conscious one? No—it is but an applica-
tion of the law of irony. The deception is
so common a one that the delinquent be-
comes unconscious of it. Every nation
gives itself the lie in the course of its daily
life, and not one feels the ridicule of its
position. A man must be a Japanese to
perceive the burlesque contradictions of the
Christian civilisation. He must be a native
of the moon to understand the stupidity of
man and his state of constant delusion.
The philosopher himself falls under the law
of irony, for after having mentally stripped
himself of all prejudice — having, that is to
say, wholly laid aside his own personality,
he finds himself slipping back perforce into
the rags he had taken off, obliged to eat and
drink, to be hungry, cold, thirsty, and to
behave like all other mortals, after having
for a moment behaved like no other. This
is the point where the comic poets are lying
in wait for him; the animal needs revenge
themselves for his flight into the Empyrean,
and mock him by their cry: — Thou art
dust, thou art nothing, thou art man!

216 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

26th November 1876. —I have just finished
a novel of Cherbuliez, Le fiancé de Made-
moiselle de St. Maur. It is a jewelled
mosaic of precious stones, sparkling with a
thousand lights. But the heart gets little
from it. The Mephistophelian type of
novel leaves one sad. ‘This subtle, refined
world is strangely near to corruption ; these
artificial women have an air of the Lower
Empire. There is not a character who is
not witty, and neither is there one who has
not bartered conscience for cleverness. The
elegance of the whole is but a mask of
immorality. These stories of feeling in
which there is no feeling make a strange
and painful impression upon me.

4th December 1876. —I have been thinking
a great deal of Victor Cherbuliez. Perhaps
his novels make up the most disputable
part of his work, — they are so much want-
ing in simplicity, feeling, reality. And
yet what knowledge, style, wit, and subt-
lety —how much thought everywhere, and
what mastery of language! He astonishes
one; I cannot but admire him.

Cherbuliez’s mind is of immense range,
clear-sighted, keen, full of resource ; he is
an Alexandrian exquisite, substituting for

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 217

the feeling which makes men earnest the
irony which leaves them free:. Pascal would
say of him —‘ He has never risen from the
order of thought to the order of charity.’
But we must not be ungrateful. A Lucian
is not worth an Augustine, but still he is
Lucian. Those who enfranchise the mind
render service to man as well as those who
persuade the heart. After the leaders come
the liberators, and the negative and critical
minds have their place and function beside
the men of affirmation, the convinced and
inspired souls. The positive element in
Victor Cherbuliez’s work is beauty, not
goodness, not moral or religious life. Ats-
thetically he is serious; what he respects is
style. And therefore he has found his voca-
tion ; for he is first and foremost.a writer
—a consummate, exquisite, and model
writer. He does not win our love, but he
claims our ieiicinaal

In every union there is a rate &
certain invisible bond which must not be
disturbed. This vital bond in the filial re-
lation is respect; in friendship, esteem ;
in marriage, confidence ; in the collective
life, patriotism ; in the religious life, faith.
Such points are best left untouched by

218 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

speech, for to touch them is almost to
profane them.

Men of genius supply the substance of
history, while the mass of men are but the
critical filter, the limiting, slackening, pas-
sive force needed for the modification of
the ideas supplied by genius. Stupidity
is dynamically the necessary balance of
intellect. To make an atmosphere which
human life can breathe, oxygen must be com-
bined with a great deal — with three-fourths
—of azote. And so, to make history, there
must be a great deal of resistance to con-
quer and of weight to drag.

5th January 1877.— This morning I am
altogether miserable, half stifled by bron-
chitis — walking a difficulty — the brain
weak —this last the worst misery of all,
for thought is my only weapon against my
other ills. Rapid deterioration of all the
bodily powers, a dull continuous waste of
vital organs, brain-decay ; — this is the trial
laid upon me, a trial that no one suspects !
Men pity you for growing old outwardly ;
but what does that matter ? — nothing, so
long as the faculties are intact. This boon
of mental soundness to the last has been

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 219

granted to so many students that I hoped
for it a little. Alas, must I sacrifice that
too? Sacrifice is almost easy when we
believe it laid upon us, asked of us, rather,
by a fatherly God and a_watchful Provi-
dence ; but I know nothing of this religious
joy. The mutilation of the self which is
going on in me lowers and lessens me with-
out doing good to anybody. Supposing I
became blind, who would be the gainer ?
Only one motive remains to me, — that of
manly resignation to the inevitable, — the
wish to set an example to others, — the Stoic
view of morals pure and simple.

This moral education of the individual
soul, —is it then wasted? When our planet
has accomplished the cycle of its destinies,
of what use will it have been to any one or
anything in the universe? Well, it will
have sounded its note in the symphony of
creation. And for us, individual atoms,
seeing monads, we appropriate a momen-
tary consciousness of the whole and the
unchangeable, and then we disappear. Is
not this enough ? No, it is not enough, for
if there is not pfogress, increase, profit,
there is nothing but a mere chemical play
and balance of combinations. Brahma,
after having created, draws his creation

220 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

back into the gulf. If we are a laboratory
of the universal mind, may that mind at
least profit and grow by us! If we realise
the supreme will, may God have ‘the joy of
it! If the trustful humility of the soul
rejoices Him more than the greatness of
intellect, let us enter into His plan, His
intention. This, in theological language,
is to live to the glory of God. Religion
consists in the filial acceptation of the
Divine Will whatever it be, provided we
see it distinctly. Well, can we doubt that
decay, sickness, death, are in the pro-
gramme of our existence? Is not destiny
the inevitable? And is not destiny the
anonymous title of Him or of That which
the religions call God? To descend with-
out murmuring the stream of destiny, to
pass without revolt through loss after loss,
and diminution after diminution, with no
other limit than zero before us,—this is
what is demanded of us. Involution is as
natural as evolution. We sink gradually
back into the darkness, just as we issued
gradually from it. The play of faculties
and organs, the grandiose apparatus of life,
is put back bit by bit into the box. We
begin by instinct; at the end comes a
clearness of vision which we must learn to

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 221

bear with and to employ without murmur-
ing upon our own failure and decay. A
musical theme once exhausted, finds its due
refuge and repose in silence.

6th February 1877. —I spent the even-
ing with the ——, and we talked of the
anarchy of ideas, of the general want of
culture, of what it is which keeps the world
going, and of the assured march of science
in the midst of universal passion and
superstition.

What is rarest in the world is fair-mind-
edness, method, the critical view, the sense
of proportion, the capacity for distinguish-
ing. The common state of human thought
is one of confusion, incoherence, and pre-
sumption, and the common state of human
hearts is a state of passion, in which equity,
impartiality, and openness to impressions
are unattainable. Men’s wills are always
in advance of their intelligence, their de-
sires ahead of their will, and accident the
source of their desires; so that they ex-
press merely fortuitous opinions which are
not worth the trouble of taking seriously,
and which have no other account to give of
themselves than this childish one: I am,
because Iam. The art of finding truth is

222 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

very little practised ; it scarcely exists, be-
cause there is no personal humility, nor
even any love of truth among us. We are
covetous enough of such knowledge as may
furnish weapons to our hand or tongue, as
may serve our vanity or gratify our craving
for power; but self-knowledge, the criti-
cism of our own appetites and prejudices,
is unwelcome and disagreeable to us.

Man is a wilful and covetous animal,
who makes use of his intellect to satisfy
his inclinations, but who cares nothing for
truth, who rebels against personal disci-
pline, who hates disinterested thought and
the idea of self-education... Wisdom offends
him, because it rouses in him disturbance
and confusion, and because he will not see
himself as he is. .

The great majority of men are but
tangled skeins, imperfect key-boards, so
many specimens of restless or stagnant
chaos, —and what makes their situation
almost hopeless is the fact that they take
pleasure init. There is no curing a sick
man who believes himself in health, _

Sth April 1877.—I have been thinking
over the pleasant evening of yesterday, an
experience in which the sweets of friend-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 223

ship, the charm of mutual understanding,
zsthetic pleasure, and a general sense of
comfort, were happily combined and inter-
mingled. There was not a crease in the
rose-leaf. Why? Because ‘all that is
pure, all that is honest, all that is excellent,
all that is lovely and of good report,’ was
there gathered together. . ‘ The incorrupti-
bility of a gentle and quiet spirit,’ inno-
cent mirth, faithfulness to duty, fine taste
and sympathetic imagination, form an
attractive and wholesome milieu in which
the soul may rest.

The party — which celebrated the last
day of vacation — gave much pleasure, and
not to me only. Is not making others
happy the best happiness? To illuminate
for an instant the depths of a deep soul,
to cheer those who bear by sympathy the
burdens of so many sorrow-laden hearts
and suffering lives, is to me a blessing and
a precious privilege. There is a sort of re-
ligious joy in helping to renew the strength
and courage of noble minds. We are sur-
prised to find ourselves the possessors of a
power of which we are not worthy, and we
long to exercise it purely and seriously.

I feel most strongly that man, in all that
he does or can do which is beautiful, great,

224 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

or good, is but the organ and the vehicle of
something or some one higher than himself.
This feeling is religion. The religious man
takes part with a tremor of sacred joy in
these phenomena of which he is the inter-
mediary but not the source, of which he is
the scene, but not the author, or rather,
the poet. He lends them voice, hand, will,
and help, but he is respectfully careful to
efface himself, that he may alter as little as
possible the higher work of the Genius who
is making a momentary use of him. A
pure emotion deprives him of personality
and annihilates the self in him. Self must
perforce disappear when it is the Holy
Spirit who speaks, when it is God who
acts. This is the mood in which the
prophet hears the call, the young mother
feels the movement of the child within, the
preacher watches the tears of his audience.
So long as we are conscious of self we are
limited, selfish, held in bondage ; when we
are in harmony with the universal order,
when we vibrate in unison with God, self
disappears. Thus, in a perfectly harmo-
nious choir, the individual cannot hear him-
self unless he makes a false note. The
religious state is one of deep enthusiasm, of
moved contemplation, of tranquil ecstasy.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 225

But how rare a state it is for us poor creat-
ures harassed by duty, by necessity, by
the wicked world, by sin, by illness! It is
the state which produces inward happi-
ness; but alas! the foundation of exist-
ence, the common texture of our days, is
made up of action, effort, struggle, and
therefore dissonance. Perpetual conflict,
interrupted by short and threatened truces,
—there is a true picture of our human
condition.

Let us hail, then, as an echo from
heaven, as the foretaste of a more blessed
economy, these brief moments of perfect
harmony, these halts between two storms.
Peace is not in itself a dream, but we know
it only as the result of a momentary equi-
librium, —an accident. ‘ Happy are the
peacemakers, for they shall be called the
children of God.’

26th April 1877. I have been turning
over again the Paris of Victor Hugo (1867).
For ten years event after event has given
the lie to the prophet, but the confidence of
the prophet in his own imaginings is not
therefore a whit diminished. Humility and
common sense are only fit for Lilliputians.
Victor Hugo superbly ignores everything

226 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

that he has not foreseen. He does not see
that pride is a limitation of the mind, and
that a pride without limitations is a little-
ness of soul. If he could but learn to com-
pare himself with other men, and France
with other nations, he would see things
more truly, and would not fall into these
mad exaggerations, these extravagant judg-
ments. But proportion and fairness will
never be among the strings at his command.
He is vowed to the Titanic; his gold is
always mixed with lead, his insight with
childishness, his reason with madness. He
cannot be simple ; the only light he has to
give blinds you like that of a fire. He
astonishes a reader and provokes him, he
moves him and annoys him. There is
always some falsity of note in him, which
accounts for the malaise he so constantly
excites inme. The great poet in him can-
not shake of the charlatan. A few shafts
of Voltairean irony would have shrivelled
the inflation of his genius and made it
stronger by making it saner. It is a public
misfortune that the most powerful poet of
a nation should not have better understood
his rdéle, and that, unlike those Hebrew
prophets who scourged because they loved,
he should devote himself proudly and sys-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 227

tematically to the flattery of his country-
men. France is the world ; Paris is France ;
Hugo is Paris; peoples, bow down !

2d May 1877.— Which nation is best
worth belonging to? There is not one in
which the good is not counterbalanced by
evil. Each is a caricature of man, a proof
that no one among them deserves to crush
the others, and that all have something to
learn from all. I am alternately struck
with the qualities and with the defects of
each, which is perhaps lucky for a critic.
Iam conscious of no preference for the de-
fects of north or south, of west or east ;
and I should find a difficulty in stating my
own predilections. Indeed I myself am
wholly indifferent in the matter, for to me
the question is not one of liking or of blam-
ing, but of understanding. My point of
view is philosophical —that is to say, im-
partial and impersonal. The only type
which pleases me is perfection —man, in
short, the ideal man. As for the national
man, I bear with and study him, but I have
no admiration for him. I can only admire
the fine specimens of the race, the great
men, the geniuses, the lofty characters and
noble souls, and specimens of these are to

228 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

be found in all the ethnographical divisions.
The ‘ country of my choice’ (to quote Ma-
dame de Staél) is with the chosen souls.
I feel no greater inclination towards the
French, the Germans, the Swiss, the Eng-
lish, the Poles, the Italians, than towards
the Brazilians or the Chinese. The illu-
sions of patriotism, of Chauvinist, family,
or professional feeling, do not exist for me.
My tendency, on the contrary, is to feel
with increased force the lacune, deformi-
ties, and imperfections of the group to which
I belong. My inclination is to see things
as they are, abstracting my own individu-
ality, and suppressing all personal will and
desire ; so that I feel antipathy, not towards
this or that, but towards error, prejudice,
stupidity, exclusiveness, exaggeration. I
love only justice and fairness. Anger and
annoyance are with me merely superficial ;
the fundamental tendency is towards im-
partiality and detachment. Inward liberty
and aspiration towards the true — these are
what I care for and take pleasure in.

4th June 1877.—I1 have just heard the
Romeo and Juliet of Hector Berlioz. The
work is entitled — ‘ Dramatic symphony
for orchestra, with choruses.’ The execu-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL- 229

tion was extremely good. The work is in-
teresting, careful, curious, and suggestive,
but it leaves one cold. — When I come to
reason out my impression I explain it in
this way. To subordinate man to things —
to annex the human voice, as a mere sup-
plement, to the orchestra — is false in idea.
To make simple narrative out of dramatic
material, is a derogation, a piece of levity.
A Romeo and Juliet in which there is no
Romeo and no Juliet is an absurdity. To
substitute the inferior, the obscure, the
vague, for the higher and the clear, is a
challenge to common sense. It is a viola-
tion of that natural hierarchy of things
which is never violated with impunity.
The musician has put together a series of
symphonic pictures, without any inner con-
nection, a string of riddles, to which a prose
text alone supplies meaning and unity. The
only intelligible voice which is allowed to
appear in the work is that of Friar Lau-
rence: his sermon could not be expressed
in chords, and is therefore plainly sung.
But the moral of a play is not the play, and
the play itself has been elbowed out by
recitative. ;

The musician of the present day, not
being able to give us what is beautiful,

230 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

torments himself to give us what is new.
False originality, false grandeur, false gen-
jus! This laboured art is wholly anti-
pathetic tome. Science simulating genius
is but a form of quackery.

Berlioz as a critic is cleverness itself ; as
a musician he is learned, inventive, and in-
genious, but he is trying to achieve the
greater when he cannot compass the lesser.
Thirty years ago, at Berlin, the same im-
pression was left upon me by his Infancy
of Christ, which I heard him conduct him-
self. His art seems to me neither fruitful
nor wholesome ; there is no true and solid
beauty in it.

I ought to say, however, that the audi-
ence, which was a fairly full one, seemed
very well satisfied.

17th July 1877. — Yesterday I went
through my La Fontaine, and noticed the
omissions in him. He has neither butterfly
nor rose. He utilises neither the crane,
nor the quail, nor the dromedary, nor the
lizard. There is not a single echo of ‘chiv-
alryinhim. For him, the history of France
dates from Louis XIV. His geography
only ranges, in reality, over a few square
miles, and touches neither the Rhine nor

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 231

the Loire, neither the mountains nor the
sea. He never invents his subjects, but in-
dolently takes them ready-made from else-
where. But with all this what an adorable
writer, what a painter, what an observer,
what a humorist, what a story-teller! I
am never tired of reading him, though I
know half his fables by heart. In the
matter of vocabulary, turns, tones, phrases,
idioms, his style is perhaps the richest of
the great period, for it combines, in the
most skilful way, archaism and classic
finish, the Gallic and the French elements.
Variety, satire, finesse, feeling, movement,
terseness, suavity, grace, gaiety, at times
even nobleness, gravity, grandeur, — every-
thing, —is to be found in him. And then
the happiness of the epithets, the piquancy
of the sayings, the felicity of his rapid
sketches and unforeseen audacities, and
the unforgettable sharpness of phrase! His
defects are eclipsed by his immense variety
of different aptitudes.

One has only to compare his ‘ Woodcutter
and Death’ with that of Boileau in order
to estimate the enormous difference between
the artist and the critic who found fault
with his work. La Fontaine gives you a
picture of the poor peasant under the

232 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

monarchy ; Boileau shows you nothing but
a man perspiring under a heavy load. The
first is a historical witness, the second a
mere academic rhymer. From La Fontaine
it is possible to reconstruct the whole society
of his epoch, and the old Champenois with
his beasts remains the only Homer France
has ever possessed. He has as many por-
traits of men and women as La Bruyére,
and Moliére is not more humorous.

His weak side is his epicureanism, with
its tinge of grossness. This, no doubt, was
what made Lamartine dislike him. The
religious note is absent from his lyre ; there
is nothing in him which shows any contact
with Christianity, any knowledge of the
sublimer tragedies of the soul. Kind nature
is his goddess, Horace his prophet, and
Montaigne his gospel. In other words, his
horizon is that of the Renaissance. This
pagan island in the full Catholic stream is
very curious; the paganism of it is so
perfectly sincere and naive. But indeed,
Rabelais, Moliére, Saint Evremond, are
much more pagan than Voltaire. It is
as though, for the genuine Frenchman,
Christianity was a mere pose or costume —
something which has nothing to do with
the heart, with the real man, or his deeper

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 233

nature. This division of things is common
in Italy too. It is the natural effect of
political religions: the priest becomes sepa-
rated from the layman, the believer from
the man, worship from sincerity.

18th July 1877. —I have just come across
a character in a novel with a passion for
synonyms, and I said to myself: Take care
—that is your weakness too. In your
search for close and delicate expression,
you run through the whole gamut of syno-
nyms, and your pen works too often in
series of three. Beware! Avoid manner-
isms and tricks; they are signs of weakness.
Subject and occasion only must govern the
use of words. Procedure by single epithet
gives strength ; the doubling of a word gives
clearness, because it supplies the two ex-
tremities of the series; the trebling of it
gives completeness by suggesting at once
the beginning, middle, and end of the idea ;
while a quadruple phrase may enrich by
force of enumeration.

Indecision being my principal defect, I
am fond of a plurality of phrases which are
but so many successive approximations and
corrections. I am especially fond of them
in this journal, where I write as it comes.

234 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

In serious composition two is, on the whole,
my category. But it would be well to
practise oneself in the use of the single
word — of the shaft delivered promptly and
once forall. I should have indeed to cure
myself of hesitation first. I see too many
ways of saying things; a more decided mind
hits on the right way at once. Singleness
of phrase implies courage, self-confidence,
clear-sightedness. To attain it there must
be no doubting, and I am always doubting.
And yet —

* Quiconque est loup agisse en loup;
C’est le plus certain de beaucoup.’

I wonder whether I should gain anything
by the attempt to assume a character which
is not mine. My wavering manner, born
of doubt and scruple, has at least the ad-
vantage of rendering all the different shades
of my thought, and of being sincere. If
it were to become terse, affirmative, resolute,
would it not be a mere imitation ?

A private journal, which is but a vehicle
for meditation and reverie, beats about the
bush as it pleases without being bound to
make for any definite end. Conversation
with self is a gradual process of thought-
clearing. Hence all these synonyms, these

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 235

waverings, these repetitions and returns
upon oneself. Affirmation may be brief;
inquiry takes time; and the line which
thought follows is necessarily an irregular
one.

I am conscious indeed that at bottom
there is but one right expression ;18 but in
order to find it I wish to make my choice
among all that are like it; and my mind
instinctively goes through a series of verbal
modulations in search of that shade which
may most accurately render the idea. Or
sometimes it is the idea itself which has
to be turned over and over, that I may
know it and apprehend it better. I think,
pen in hand ; it is like the disentanglement,
the winding-off of a skein. Evidently the
corresponding form of style cannot have
the qualities which belong to thought which
is already sure of itself, and only seeks to
communicate itself to others. The function
of the private journal is one of observation,
experiment, analysis, contemplation ; that
of the essay or article is to provoke reflec-
tion ; that of the book is to demonstrate.

21st July 1877.—A superb night, —a
starry sky, — Jupiter and Phoebe holding
converse before my windows. Grandiose

236 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

effects of light and shade over the court-
yard. A sonata rose from the black gulf
of shadow like a repentant prayer wafted
from purgatory. The picturesque was lost
in poetry, and admiration in feeling.

30th July 1877.— . . . makes a very true
remark about Renan, @ propos of the vyol-
ume of Les Evangiles. He brings out the
contradiction between the literary taste of
the artist, which is delicate, individual, and
true, and the opinions of the critic, which
are borrowed, old-fashioned, and wavering.
— This hesitancy of choice between the
beautiful and the true, between poetry and
prose, between art and learning, is, in fact,
characteristic. Renan has a keen love for
science, but he has a still keener love for
good writing, and, if necessary, he- will
sacrifice the exact phrase to the beautiful
phrase. Science is his material rather than
-his object ; his object is style. <A fine pas-
sage is ten times more precious in his eyes
than the discovery of a fact or the rectifica-
tion of a date. And on this point I am
very much with him, for a beautiful piece
of writing is beautiful by virtue of a kind
of truth which is truer than any mere
record of authentic facts. Rousseau also

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 237

thought the same. A chronicler may be
able to correct Tacitus, but Tacitus survives
all the chroniclers. I know well that the
esthetic temptation is the French tempta-
tion ; Ihave often bewailed it, and yet, if
I desired anything, it would be to be a
writer, a great writer. To leave a monu-
ment behind, aere perennius, an imperish-
able work which might stir the thoughts,
the feelings, the dreams of men, generation
after generation, —this is the only glory
which I could wish for, if I were not weaned!
even from this wish also. A book would
be my ambition, if ambition were not van-
ity and vanity of vanities.

11th August 1877.— The growing triumph
of Darwinism — that is to say of material-
ism, or of force — threatens the conception
of justice. But justice will have its turn.
The higher human law cannot be the off-
spring of animality. Justice is the right to!
the maximum of individual independence |
compatible with the same liberty for others; ,
— in other words, it is respect for man, for
the immature, the small, the feeble; it is
the guarantee of those human collectivities,
associations, states, nationalities — those
voluntary or involuntary unions —the ob-

238 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

ject of which is to increase the sum of hap-
piness, and to satisfy the aspiration of the
individual. That some should make use of
others for their own purposes is an injury -
to justice. The right of the stronger is not
a right, but a simple fact, which obtains
only so long as there is neither protest nor
resistance. It is like cold, darkness, weight,
which tyrannise over man until he has in-
vented artificial warmth, artificial light, and
machinery. Human industry is throughout
an emancipation from brute nature, and
the advances made by justice are in the
same way a series of rebuffs inflicted upon
the tyranny of the stronger. As the med-
ical art consists in the conquest of disease,
so goodness consists in the conquest of the
blind ferocities and untamed appetites of
the human animal. I see the same law
throughout : — increasing emancipation of
the individual, a continuous ascent of being
towards life, happiness, justice, and wisdom.
_ Greed and gluttony are the starting-point,
intelligence and generosity the goal.

21st August 1877 (Baths of Ems). —In
the salon there has been a performance in
chorus of ‘ Lorelei’ and other popular airs.
What in our country is only done for wor

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 239

ship is done also in Germany for poetry
and music. Voices blend together; art
shares the privilege of religion. It is a
trait which is neither French nor English,
nor, I think, Italian. The spirit of artistic
devotion, of impersonal combination, of
common, harmonious, disinterested action,
is specially German ; it makes a welcome
balance to certain clumsy and prosaic ele-
ments in the race.

Later. — Perhaps the craving for inde-
pendence of thought —the tendency to go
back to first principles — is really proper to
the Germanic mind only. The Slavs and
the Latins are governed rather by the col-
lective wisdom of the community, by tra-
dition, usage, prejudice, fashion ; or, if they
break through these, they are like slaves in
revolt, without any real living apprehension
of the law inherent in things, —the true
law, which is neither written, nor arbitrary,
nor imposed. The German wishes to get
at Nature ; the Frenchman, the Spaniard,

‘the Russian, stop at conventions. The
root of the problem is in the question of
the relations between God and the world.
Immanence or transcendence, — that, step
by step, decides the meaning of everything

—,

240 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

else. If the mind is radically external to
things, it is not called upon to conform to
them. If the mind is destitute of native
truth, it must get its truth from outside, by
revelations. And so you get thought despis-
ing Nature, and in bondage to the Church
— so you have the Latin world !

6th November 1877 (Geneva). — We talk
of love many years before we know any-
thing about it, and we think we know it
because we talk of it, or because we repeat
what other people say of it, or what books
tell us about it. So that there are igno-
rances of different degrees, and degrees of
knowledge which are quite deceptive. One

_ of the worst plagues of society is this
thoughtless inexhaustible verbosity, this

careless use of words, this pretence of know-
ing a thing because we talk about it, — these
counterfeits of belief, thought, love, or
earnestness, which all the while are mere
babble. The worst of it is, that as self-love |
is behind the babble, these ignorances of
society are in general ferociously affirma-:

tive; chatter mistakes itself for opinion,

prejudice poses as principle. Parrots be-

have as though they were thinking beings ;
imitations give themselves out as originals ;

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 241

and politeness demands the acceptance of (
the convention. It is very wearisome. ;

Language is the vehicle of this confusion, ;
the instrument of this unconscious fraud,
and all evils of the kind are enormously
increased by universal education, by the
periodical press, and by all the other proc-
esses of vulgarisation in use at the present
time. Every one dealsin paper money; few
have ever handled gold. We live on sym-
bols, and even on the symbols of symbols ;
we have never grasped or verified things
for ourselves ; we judge everything, and we
know nothing.

How seldom we meet with originality,
individuality, sincerity, nowadays ! — with
men who are worth the trouble of listening
to! The true self in the majority is lost in
the borrowed self. How few are anything
else than a bundle of inclinations — any-
thing more than animals — whose language
and whose gait alone recall to us the high-
est rank in nature !

The immense majority of our species are
* candidates for humanity, and nothing more.
Virtually we are men; we might be, we
ought to be, men; but practically we do
not succeed in realising the type of our
race. Semblances and counterfeits of men

242 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

fill up the habitable earth, people the
islands and the continents, the country
and the town. If we wish to respect men
we must forget what they are, and think of
the ideal which they carry hidden within
them, of the just man and the noble, the
man of intelligence and goodness, inspi-
ration and creative force, who is loyal
and true, faithful and trustworthy, of the
higher man, in short, and that divine thing
we callasoul. The only men who deserve
the name are the heroes, the geniuses, the
saints, the harmonious, puissant, and per-
fect samples of the race.

Very few individuals deserve to be lis-
tened to, but all deserve that our curiosity
with regard to them should be a pitiful
curiosity —that the insight we bring to
bear on them should be charged with
humility. Are we not all shipwrecked,
diseased, condemned to death? Let each
work out his own salvation, and blame no
one but himself; so the lot of all will be
bettered. Whatever impatience we may
feel towards our neighbour, and whatever
indignation our race may rouse in us, we
are chained one to another, and, compan-
ions in labour and misfortune, have every-
thing to lose by mutual recrimination and

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 243

reproach. Let us be silent as to each
other’s weakness, helpful, tolerant, nay,
tender towards each other! Or, if we
cannot feel tenderness, may we at least
feel pity! May we put away from us the
satire which scourges and the anger which
brands: the oil and wine of the good
Samaritan are of more avail. We may
make the ideal a reason for contempt; but
it is more beautiful to make it a reason for
tenderness.

9th December 1877, — The modern haunt-
ers of Parnassus?! carve urns of agate and
of onyx, but inside the urns what is there ?
—ashes. Their work lacks feeling, serious-
ness, sincerity, and pathos—in a word,
soul and moral life. I cannot bring myself
to sympathise with such a way of under-
standing poetry. The talent shown is as-
tonishing, but stuff and matter are wanting.
It is an effort of the imagination to stand
alone—a substitute for everything else.
We find metaphors, rhymes, music, colour,
but not man, not humanity. Poetry of this
factitious kind may beguile one at twenty,
but what can one make of it at fifty? It
reminds me of Pergamos, of Alexandria, of
_all the epochs of decadence when beauty

244 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

of form hid poverty of thought and exhaus-
tion of feeling. I strongly share the repug-
nance which this poetical school arouses in
simple people. It is as though it only cared
to please the world-worn, the over-subtle,
the corrupted, while it ignores all normal
healthy life, virtuous habits, pure affections,
steady labour, honesty, and duty. It is an
affectation, and because it is an affectation
the school is struck with sterility, The
reader desires in the poet something better
than a juggler in rhyme, or a conjuror in
verse ; he looks to find in him a painter of
life, a being who thinks, loves, and has a
conscience, who feels passion and repent-
ance.

Composition is a process of combination,
in which thought puts together complement-
ary truths, and talent fuses into harmony
the most contrary qualities of style. So
that there is no composition without effort,
without pain even, as in all bringing forth.
The reward is the giving birth to something
living —something, that is to say, which,
by a kind of magic, makes a living unity
out of such opposed attributes as orderli-
ness and spontaneity, thought and imagina-
tion, solidity and charm.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 245

The true critic strives for a clear vision
of things as they are —for justice and fair-
ness; his effort is to get free from himself,
so that he may in no way disfigure that
which he wishes to understand or repro-
duce. His superiority to the common herd
lies in this effort, even when its success is
only partial. He distrusts his own senses,
he sifts his own impressions, by returning
upon them from different sides and at dif-
ferent times, by comparing, moderating,
shading, distinguishing, and so endeavour-
ing to approach more and more nearly to
the formula which represents the maximum
of truth.

Is it not the sad natures who are most
tolerant of gaiety ? They know that gaiety
means impulse and vigour, that generally
speaking it is disguised kindliness, and that
if it were a mere affair of temperament and
mood, still it is a blessing.

The art which is grand and yet simple is
that which presupposes the greatest eleva-
tion both in artist and in public.

How much folly is compatible with ulti-
mate wisdom and prudence? It is difficult

246 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

to say. The cleverest folk are those who
discover soonest how to utilise their neigh-
bour’s experience, and so get rid in good
time of their natural presumption.

We must try to grasp the spirit of things,
to see correctly, to speak to the point, to
give practicable advice, to act on the spot,
to arrive at the proper moment, to stop in
time. Tact, measure, occasion —all these
deserve.our cultivation and respect.

22d April 1878.— Letter from my cousin
Julia. These kind old relations find it
very difficult to understand a man’s life,
especially a student’s life. The hermits of
reverie are scared by the busy world, and
feel themselves out of place in action. But
after all, we do not change at seventy, and
a good, pious old lady, half-blind and living
in a village, can no longer extend her point
of view, nor form any idea of existences
which have no relation with her own.

What is the link by which these souls,
shut in and encompassed as they are by the
details of daily life, lay hold on the ideal ?
The link of religious aspiration. Faith is
the plank which saves them. They know
the meaning of the higher life; their soul

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 247

is athirst for Heaven. Their opinions are
defective, but their moral experience is
great; their intellect is full of darkness,
but their soul is full of light. We scarcely
know how to talk to them about the things
of earth, but they are ripe and mature in
the things of the heart. If they cannot
understand us, it is for us to make advances
to them, to speak their language, to enter
into their range of ideas, their modes of
feeling. We must approach them on their
noble side, and, that we may show them
the more respect, induce them to open to us
the casket of their most treasured thoughts.
There is always some grain of gold at the
bottom of every honourable old age. Let
it be our business to give it an opportunity
of showing itself to affectionate eyes.

10th May 1878. —I have just come back
from a solitary walk. I heard nightingales,
saw white lilac and orchard trees in bloom.
My heart is full of impressions showered
upon it by the chaffinches, the golden
orioles, the grasshoppers, the hawthorns,
and the primroses. <A dull, gray, fleecy
sky brooded with a certain melancholy
over the nuptial splendours of vegetation.
Many painful memories stirred afresh in

248 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

me; at Pré l’Evéque, at Jargonnant, at
Villereuse, a score of phantoms — phantoms
of youth —rose with sad eyes to greet me.
The walls had changed, and roads which
were once shady and dreamy I found now
waste and treeless. But at the first trills
of the nightingale a flood of tender feeling
filled my heart. I felt myself soothed,
grateful, melted; a mood of serenity and
contemplation took possession of me. A
certain little path, a very kingdom of green,
with fountain, thickets, gentle ups and
downs, and an abundance of singing-birds,
delighted me, and did me inexpressible
good. Its peaceful remoteness brought back
the bloom of feeling. I had need of it.

19th May 1878. —Criticism is above all
a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and
Jair ; it cannot be taught or demonstrated,
—it is an art. Critical genius means an
aptitude for discerning truth under appear-
ances or in disguises which conceal it; for
discovering it in spite of the errors of testi-
mony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of
time, the loss or alteration of texts. Itis
the sagacity of the hunter.whom nothing
deceives for long, and whom no ruse can
throw off the trail. It is the talent of the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 249

Juge @ Instruction, who knows how to in-
terrogate circumstances, and to extract an
unknown secret from a thousand false-
hoods. The true critic can understand
everything, but he will be the dupe of
nothing, and to no convention will he sacri-
fice his duty, which is to find out and pro-
claim truth. Competent learning, general
cultivation, absolute probity, accuracy of
general view, human sympathy and techni-
cal capacity, — how many things are neces-
sary to the critic, without reckoning grace,
delicacy, savoir vivre, and the gift of happy
phrase-making!

26th July 1878. — Every morning I wake
up with the same sense of vain struggle
against a mountain tide which is about to
overwhelm me. I shall die by suffocation,
and the suffocation has begun ; the progress
it has already made stimulates it to go on.

How can one make any plans when every
day brings with it some fresh misery? I
cannot even decide on a line of action in a
situation so full of confusion and uncer-
tainty, in which I look forward to the
worst, while yet all is doubtful. Have I
still a few years before me or only a few
months? Will death be slow or will it

250 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

come upon me as a sudden catastrophe ?
How am I to bear the days as they come ?
how am I to fill them? How am I to die
with calmness and dignity? I know not.
Everything I do for the first time I do
badly ; but here everything is new; there
can be no help from experience; the end
must be a chance! How mortifying for one
who has set so great a price upon indepen-
dence — to depend upon a thousand unfore-
seen contingencies! He knows not how he
will act or what he will become; he would
fain speak of these things with a friend of
good sense and good counsel —but who?
He dares not alarm the affections which are
most his own, and he is almost sure that
any others would try to distract his atten-
tion, and would refuse to see the position
as it is.

And while I wait (wait for what ?—
health ? — certainty ?) the weeks flow by
like water, and strength wastes away like
a smoking candle. ...

Is one free to let oneself drift into death
without resistance? Is self-preservation a
duty ? Do we owe it to those who love us
to prolong this desperate struggle to its
utmost limit? I think so, but it is one
fetter the more. For we must then feign

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 251

a hope which we do not feel, and hide the
absolute discouragement of which the heart
is really full. Well, why not? Those who
succumb are bound in generosity not to
cool the ardour of those who are still bat-
tling, still enjoying.

Two parallel roads lead to the same re-
sult ; meditation paralyses me, physiology
condemns me. My soul is dying, my body
is dying. In every direction the end is
closing upon me. My own melancholy
anticipates and endorses the medical judg-
ment which says, ‘Your journey is done.’
The two verdicts point to the same result
—that I have no longer a future. And yet
there is a side of me which says, ‘ Absurd !’
which is incredulous, and inclined to regard
it all as a bad dream. In vain the reason
asserts it; the mind’s inward assent is still
refused. Another contradiction !

I have not the strength to hope, and I
have not the strength to submit. I believe
no longer, and I believe still. I feel that I
am dying, and yet I cannot realise that I
am dying. Is it madness already ? No, it
is human nature taken in the act; it is life
itself which is a contradiction, for life means
an incessant death and a daily resurrection ;
it affirms and it denies, it destroys and re- ,

252 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

constructs, it gathers and scatters, it hum-
bles and exalts at the same time. To live
is to die partially —to feel oneself in the
heart of a whirlwind of opposing forces—
té be an enigma.

If the invisible type moulded by these
two contradictory currents —if this form
which presides over all my changes of be-
ing — has itself general and original value,
what does it matter whether it carries on
the game a few months or years longer, or
not? It has done what it had to do, it has
represented a certain unique combination,
one particular expression of the race.
These types are shadows—manes. Cen-
tury after century employs itself in fashion-
ing them. Glory —fame— is the proof that
one type has seemed to the other types
newer, rarer, and more beautiful than the
rest. The common types are souls too,
only they have no interest except for the
Creator, and for a small number of indi-
viduals.

To feel one’s own fragility is well, but to
be indifferent to it is better. To take the
measure of one’s own misery is profitable,
but to understand its raison d’étre is still
more profitable. ‘To mourn for oneself is a
_ last sign of vanity ; we ought only to regret

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 253

that which has real value, and to regret
oneself, is to furnish involuntary evidence
that one had attached importance to one-
self. At the same time it is a proof of
ignorance of our true worth and function.
It is not necessary to live, but it is neces-
sary to preserve one’s type unharmed, to
remain faithful to one’s idea, to protect
one’s monad against alteration and degra-
dation.

7th November 1878.—To-day we have
been talking of realism in painting, and, in
connection with it, of that poetical and
artistic illusion which does not aim at
being confounded with reality itself. Real-
ism wishes to entrap sensation ; the object
of true art is only to charm the imagina-
tion, not to deceive the eye. When we see
a good portrait we say, ‘It is alive!’ —in
other words, our imagination lends it life.
On the other hand, a wax figure produces a
sort of terror in us; its frozen lifelikeness
makes a deathlike impression on us, and
we say, ‘It is a ghost!’ In the one case
we see what is lacking, and demand it; in
the other we see what is given us, and
we give on our side, Art, then, addresses
itself to the imagination ; everything that

254 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

appeals to sensation only is below art,
almost outside art. A work of art ought
to set the poetical faculty in us to work, it
ought to stir us to imagine, to complete our
perception of a thing. And we can only
do this when the artist leads the way
Mere copyist’s painting, realistic reproduc-
tion, pure imitation, leave us cold because
their author is a machine, a mirror, an
iodised plate, and not a soul.

Art lives by appearances, but these ap-
pearances are spiritual visions, fixed dreams.
Poetry represents to us nature become con-
substantial with the soul, because in it
nature is only a reminiscence touched with
emotion, an image vibrating with our own
life, a form without weight,—in short, a
mode of the soul. The poetry which is
most real and objective is the expression of
a soul which throws itself into things, and
forgets itself in their presence more readily
than others ; but still, it is the expression
of a soul, and hence what we call style.
Style may be only collective, hieratic, na-
tional, so long as the artist is still the
interpreter of the community ; it tends to
become personal in proportion as society
makes room for individuality and favours
its expansion.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 255

There is a way of killing truth by truths.
Under the pretence that we want to study
it more in detail we pulverise the statue —
it is an absurdity of which our pedantry is
constantly guilty. Those who can only see
the fragments of a thing are to me esprits
faux, just as much as those who disfigure
the fragments. The good critic ought to
be master of the three capacities, the three
modes of seeing men and things — he should
be able simultaneously to see them as they
are, as they might be, and as they ought
to be.

Modern culture is a delicate electuary
made up of varied savours and subtle col-
ours, which can be more easily felt than
measured or defined. Its very superiority
consists in the complexity, the association
of contraries, the skilful combination it
implies. The man of to-day, fashioned by
the historical and geographical influences of
twenty countries. and of thirty centuries,
trained and modified by all the sciences and
all the arts, the supple recipient of all lit-
eratures, is an entirely new product. He
finds affinities, relationships, analogies every-
where, but at the same time he condenses

256 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

and sums up what is elsewhere scattered.
He is like the smile of La Gioconda, which
seems to reveal a soul to the spectator only
to leave him the more certainly under a
final impression of mystery, so many dif-
ferent things are expressed in it at once.

To understand things we must have been
once in them and then have come out of
them ; so that first there must be captivity
and then deliverance, illusion followed by
disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment.
He who is still under the spell, and he who
has never felt the spell, are equally incom-
petent. We only know well what we have
first believed, then judged. To understand
we must be free, yet not have been always
free. The same truth holds, whether it is
a question of love, of art, of religion, or of
patriotism. Sympathy is a first condition
of criticism ; reason and justice presuppose,
at their origin, emotion.

What is an intelligent man? A man
who enters with ease and completeness into
the spirit of things and the intention of
persons, and who.arrives at an end by the
shortest route. Lucidity and suppleness of
thought, critical delicacy and inventive re-
source, these are his attributes.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL, 257

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain
once ground into flour springs and germi-
nates no more.

8d January 1879.— Letter from ——.
This kind friend of mine has no pity. .. .
I have been trying to quiet his over-delicate
susceptibilities. . . . It is difficult to write
perfectly easy letters when one finds them
studied with a magnifying glass, and treated
like monumental inscriptions, in which each
character has been deliberately engraved
with a view to an eternity of life. Such
disproportion between the word and its
commentary, between the playfulness of the
writer and the analytical temper of the
reader, is not favourable to ease of style.
One dares not be one’s natural self with
these serious folk who attach importance to
everything ; it is difficult to write open-
heartedly if one must weigh every phrase
and every word.

Esprit means taking things in the sense
which they are meant to have, entering into
the tone of other people, being able to place
oneself on the required level ; esprit is that
just and accurate sense which divines, ap-
preciates, and weighs quickly, lightly, and

258 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

well. The mind must have its play, the
Muse is winged —the Greeks knew it, and
Socrates.

13th January 1879. —It is impossible for
me to remember what letters I wrote yes-
terday. A single night digs a gulf between
the self of yesterday and the self of to-day.
My life is without unity of action, because
my actions themselves are escaping from
the control of memory. My mental power,
occupied in gaining possession of itself
under the form of consciousness, seems to
be letting go its hold on all that generally
peoples the understanding, as the glacier
throws off the stones and fragments fallen
into its crevasses, that it may remain pure
crystal. The philosophic mind is loth to
overweight itself with too many material
facts or trivial memories. Thought clings
only to thought, — that is to say, to itself,
to the psychological process. The mind’s
only ambition is for an enriched experience.
It finds its pleasure in studying the play
of its own faculties, and the study passes
easily into an aptitude and habit. Reflec-
tion becomes nothing more than an appara-
tus for the registration of the impressions,
emotions, and ideas which pass across the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 259

mind. The whole moulting process is car-
ried on so energetically that the mind is not
only unclothed, but stripped of itself, and,
so to speak, de-substantiated. The wheel
turns so quickly that it melts around the
mathematical axis, which alone remains
cold because it is impalpable, and has no
thickness. — All this is natural enough, but
very dangerous.

So long as one is numbered among the
living, —so long, that is to say, as one is
still plunged in the world of men, a sharer
of their interests, conflicts, vanities, pas-
sions, and duties, one is bound to deny
oneself this subtle state of consciousness ;
one must consent to be a separate individ-
ual, having one’s special name, position,
age, and sphere of activity. In spite of all
the temptations of impersonality, one must
resume the position of a being imprisoned
within certain limits of time and space,
an individual with special surroundings,
friends, enemies, profession, country, bound
to house and feed himself, to make up his
accounts and look after his affairs; in
short, one must behave like all the world.
There are days when all these details seem
to me a dream,— when I wonder at the
desk under my hand, at my body itself, —

260 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

when I ask myself if there is a street before
my house, and if all this geographical and
topographical phantasmagoria is indeed real.
Time and space become then mere specks ;
I become a sharer in a purely spiritual
existence ; I see myself sub specie wternita-
tis.

Is not mind simply that which enables
us to merge finite reality in the infinite
possibility around it? Or, to put it differ-
ently, is not mind the universal virtuality,
the universe latent? If so, its zero would
be the germ of the infinite, which is ex-
pressed mathematically by the double zero
(00).

Deduction : — that the mind may experi-
ence the infinite in itself; that in the
human individual there arises sometimes
the divine spark which reveals to him the
existence of the original, fundamental,
principal Being, within which all is con-
tained like a series within its generating
formula. The universe is but a radiation
of mind; and the radiations of the Divine
mind are for us more than appearances;
they have a reality parallel to our own.
The radiations of our mind are imperfect
reflections from the great show of fireworks
set in motion by Brahma, and great, are

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 261

is great only because of its conformities
with the Divine order— with that which
is.
Ideal conceptions are the mind’s antici-
pation of such an order. The mind is
capable of them because it is mind, and, as
such, perceives the Eternal. The real, on
the contrary, is fragmentary and passing.
Law alone is eternal. The ideal is then the
imperishable hope of something better, the
mind’s involuntary protest against the pres-
ent, the leaven of the future working in it.
It is the supernatural in us, or rather the
super-animal, and the ground of human
progress. He who has no ideal contents
himself with what is; he has no quarrel
with facts, which for him are identical
with the just, the good, and the beautiful.
But why is the Divine radiation imper-
fect? Because it is still going on. Our
planet, for example, is in the midcourse of
its experience. Its flora and fauna are
still changing. The evolution of humanity
is nearer its origin than its close. The
complete spiritualisation of the animal ele-
ment in nature seems to be singularly
difficult, and it is the task of our species.
Its performance is hindered by error, evil,
selfishness, and death, without counting

262 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

telluric catastrophes. The edifice of a
common happiness, a common science of
morality and justice, is sketched, but only
sketched. A thousand retarding and per-
turbing causes hinder this giant’s task, in
which nations, races, and continents take
part. At the present moment humanity is
not yet constituted as a physical unity, and
its general education is not yet begun.
All our attempts at order as yet have been
local crystallisations. Now, indeed, the
different possibilities are beginning to com-
bine (union of posts and telegraphs, univer-
sal exhibitions, voyages round the globes,
international congresses, etc.). Science
and common interest are binding together
the great fractions of humanity, which
religion and language have kept apart. A
year in which there has been talk of a net-
work of African railways, running from the
coast to the centre and bringing the At-
lantic, the Mediterranean, and the Indian
Ocean into communication with each other
—such a year is enough to mark a new
epoch. The fantastic has become the con-
ceivable, the possible tends to become the
real ; the earth becomes the garden of man.
Man’s chief problem is how to make the
cohabitation of the individuals of his spe-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 263

cies possible ; how, that is to say, to secure
for each successive epoch the law, the order,
the equilibrium which befits it. Division
of labour allows him to explore in every
direction at once; industry, science, art,
law, education, morals, religion, politics,
and economical relations, — all are in proc-
ess of birth.

Thus everything may be brought back to
zero by the mind, but it is a fruitful zero —
a zero which contains the universe and, in
particular, humanity. The mind has no
more difficulty in tracking the real within
the innumerable than in apprehending in-
finite possibility. 00 may issue from 0, or
may return to it.

19th January 1879. — Charity — goodness
— places a voluntary curb on acuteness of
perception ; it screens and softens the rays
of a too vivid insight ; it refuses to see too
clearly the ugliness and misery of the great
intellectual hospital around it. True good-
ness is loth to recognise any privilege in
itself; it prefers to be humble and charita-
ble ; it tries not to see what stares it in the
face, — that is to say, the imperfections, in-
firmities, and errors of humankind ; its pity
puts on airs of approval and encouragement.

264 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

It triumphs over its own repulsions that it
may help and raise.

It has often been remarked that Vinet
praised weak things. If so, it was not from
any failure in his own critical sense ; it was
from charity. ‘Quench not the smoking
flax,’—to which I add, ‘Never give un-
necessary pain.’ The cricket is not the
nightingale; why tell him so? Throw
yourself into the mind of the cricket — the
process is newer and more ingenious; and
it is what charity commands.

Intellect is aristocratic, charity is demo-
cratic. In ademocracy the general equality
of pretensions, combined with the inequality
of merits, creates considerable practical
difficulty ; some get out of it by making
their prudence a muzzle on their frankness ;
others, by using kindness as a corrective of
perspicacity. On the whole, kindness is
safer than reserve; it inflicts no wound,
and kills nothing. :

Charity is generous; it runs a risk will-
ingly, and in spite of a hundred succes-
sive experiences, it thinks no evil-at the
hundred-and-first. We cannot be at the
same time kind and wary, nor can we
serve two masters, —love and selfishness.
We must be knowingly rash, that we may

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 265

not be like the clever ones of the world,
who never forget their own interests. We
must be able to submit to being deceived ;
it is the sacrifice which interest and self-
love owe to conscience. The claims of the
soul must be satisfied first if we are to be
the children of God.

Was it not Bossuet who said, ‘It is only
the great souls who know all the grandeur
there is in charity’ ?

21st January 1879. — At first religion
holds the place of science and philosophy ;
afterwards she has to learn to confine her-
self to her own domain — which is in the
inmost depths of conscience, in the secret
recesses of the soul, where life communes
with the Divine will and the universal
order. Piety is the daily renewing of the
ideal, the steadying of our inner being, agi-
tated, troubled, and embittered by the com-
mon accidents of existence. Prayer is the
spiritual balm, the precious cordial which
restores to us peace and courage. It re-
minds us of pardon and of duty. It says
to us, ‘Thou art loved—love; thou hast
received — give; thou must die — labour
while thou canst ; overcome anger by kind-
ness ; overcome evil with good. What does

266 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

the blindness of opinion matter, or mis-
understanding, or ingratitude? Thou art
neither bound to follow the common ex-
ample nor to succeed. Fais ce que dois,
advienne que pourra. Thou hast a witness
in thy conscience; and thy conscience is
God speaking to thee !’

8d March 1879. —The sensible politician
is governed by considerations of social
utility, the public good, the greatest attain-
able good; the political windbag starts
from the idea of the rights of the indi-
vidual, — abstract rights, of which the ex-
tent is affirmed, not demonstrated, for the
political right of the individual is precisely
what is in question. The revolutionary
school always forgets that right apart from
duty is a compass with one leg. The no-
tion of right inflates the individual, fills
him with thoughts of self and of what others
owe him, while it ignores the other side of
the question, and extinguishes his capacity
for devoting himself to a common cause.
The State becomes a shop with self-interest
for a principle, — or rather an arena, in
which every combatant fights for his own
hand only. In either case self is the mo-
tive power.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 267

Church and State ought to provide two
opposite careers for the individual; in the
State he should be called on to give proof
of merit —that is to say, he should earn
his rights by services rendered; in the
Church his task should be to do good while
suppressing his own merits, by a voluntary
act of humility.

Extreme individualism dissipates the
moral substance of the individual. It leads
him to subordinate everything to himself,
and to think the world, society, the State,
made for him. Iam chilled by its lack of
gratitude, of the spirit of deference, of the
instinct of solidarity. - It isan ideal without
beauty and without grandeur.

But, as a consolation, the modern zeal
for equality makes a counterpoise for Dar-
winism, just as one wolf holds another wolf
in check. Neither, indeed, acknowledges
the claim of duty. The fanatic for equality
affirms his right not to be eaten by his
neighbour; the Darwinian states the fact
that the big devour the little, and adds —
so much the better. Neither the one nor
the other has a word to say of love, of
eternity, of kindness, of piety, of voluntary
submission, of self-surrender.

All forces and all principles are brought

268 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

into action at once in this world. The
result is, on the whole, good. But the
struggle itself is hateful because it dislo-
cates truth and shows us nothing but error
pitted against error, party against party ;
that is to say, mere halves and fragments
of being— monsters against monsters. A
nature in love with beauty cannot reconcile
itself to the sight; it longs for harmony,
for something else than perpetual disso-
nance. The common condition of human
society must indeed be accepted; tumult,
hatred, fraud, crime, the ferocity of self-
interest, the tenacity of prejudice, are
perennial; but the philosopher sighs over
it; his heart is not in it; his ambition is to
see human history from a height; his ear
is set to catch the music of the eternal
spheres. ;

15th March 1879. —I have been turning
over Les histoires de mon Parrain by Stahl,
and a few chapters of Nos Fils et nos
Filles by Legouvé. These writers press
wit, grace, gaiety, and charm into the ser-
vice of goodness; their desire is to show
that virtue is not so dull nor common sense
so tiresome as people believe. They are
persuasive moralists, captivating story-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 269

tellers; they rouse the appetite for good.
This pretty manner of theirs, however, has
its dangers. A moral wrapped up in sugar
goes down certainly, but it may be feared
that it only goes down because of its sugar.
The Sybarites of to-day will tolerate a ser-
mon which is delicate enough to flatter
their literary sensuality; but it is their
taste which is charmed, not their con-
science which is awakened : their principle
of conduct escapes untouched.

Amusement, instruction, morals, are dis-
tinct genres. They may no doubt be min-
gled and combined, but if we wish to obtain
direct and simple effects, we shall do best
to keep them apart. The well-disposed
child, besides, does not like mixtures which
have something of artifice and deception in
them. Duty claims obedience; study re-
quires application ; for amusement, nothing
is wanted but good temper. To convert
obedience and application into means of
amusement is to weaken the will and the
intelligence. These efforts to make virtue
the fashion are praiseworthy enough, but
if they do honour to the writers, on the
other hand they prove the moral anemia
of society. When the digestion is unspoilt,
so much persuading is not necessary to
give it a taste for bread.

270 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

22d May 1879 (Ascension Day). — Won-
derful and delicious weather. Soft, caress-
ing sunlight,—the air a limpid blue, —
twitterings of birds ; even the distant voices
of the city have something young and spring-
sike in them. It is indeed a new birth.
The ascension of the Saviour of men is
symbolised by this expansion, this heayen-
ward yearning of nature. ... I feel my-
self born again; all the windows of the
soul are clear. Forms, lines, tints, reflec-
tions, sounds, contrasts, and harmonies,
the general play and interchange of things,
—it is all enchanting! The atmosphere is
steeped in joy. May is in full beauty.

Inmy courtyard the ivy is green again,
the chestnut tree is full of leaf, the Persian
lilac beside the little fountain is flushed
with red, and just about to flower; through
the wide openings to the right and left
of the old College of Calvin I see the
Saléve above the trees of St. Antoine, the
Voirons above the hill of Cologny ; while
the three flights of steps which, from land-
ing to landing, lead between two high walls
from the Rue Verdaine to the terrace of
the Tranchées, recall to one’s imagination
some old city of the south} a — of
Perugia or of Malaga.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 271

All the bells are ringing. It is the hour
of worship. A historical and religious im-
pression mingles with the picturesque, the
musical, the poetical impressions of the
scene. Al] the peoples of Christendom —
all the Churches scattered over the globe —
are celebrating at this moment the glory of
the Crucified.

And what are those many nations doing
who have other prophets, and honour the
Divinity in other ways ?—the Jews, the
Mussulmans, the Buddhists, the Vishnuists,
the Guebers? They have other sacred
days, other rites, other solemnities, other
beliefs. But all have some religion, some
ideal end for life—all aim at raising man
above the sorrows and smallnesses of the
present, and of the individual existence.
All have faith in something greater than
themselves, all pray, all bow, all adore;
all see beyond nature, Spirit, and beyond
evil, Good. All bear witness to the Invis-
ible. Here we have the link which binds
all peoples together. All men are equally
creatures of sorrow and desire, of hope and
fear. All long to recover some lost har-
mony with the great order of things, and
to feel themselves approved and blessed by
the Author of the universe. All know

272 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

what suffering is, and yearn for happiness.
All know what sin is, and feel the need of
pardon.

Christianity reduced to its original sim-
plicity is the reconciliation of the sinner
with God, by means of the certainty that
God loves in spite of everything, and that
He chastises because He loves. Christian-
ity furnished a new motive and a new
strength for the achievement of moral
perfection. It made holiness attractive by
giving to it the air of filial gratitude.

28th June 1879.— Last lecture of the
term and of the academic year. I finished
the exposition of modern philosophy, and
wound up my course with the precision I
wished. The circle has returned upon
itself. In order to do this I have divided
my hour into minutes, calculated my mate-
rial, and counted every stitch and point.
This, however, is but a very small part of
the professorial science. It is a more diffi-
cult matter to divide one’s whole material
into a given number of lectures, to deter-
mine the right proportions of the different
parts, and the normal speed of delivery to
be attained. The ordinary lecturer may
achieve a series of complete séances, — the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 273

unity being the séance. But a scientific
course ought to aim at something more —
at a general unity of subject and of expo-
sition.

Has this concise, substantial, closely-
reasoned kind of work been useful to my
class? I cannot tell. Have my students
liked me this year? I am not sure, but I
hope so. It seems tome they have. Only,
if I have pleased them, it cannot have been
in any case more than a succés d’estime ; I
have never aimed at any oratorical success.
My only object is to light up for them a
complicated and difficult subject. I respect
myself too much, and I respect my class
too much, to attempt rhetoric. My 7dle is
to help them to understand. Scientific lec-
turing ought to be, above all things, clear,
instructive, well put together, and convinc-
ing. A lecturer has nothing to do with
paying court to the scholars, or with show-
ing off the master; his business is one of
serious study and impersonal exposition.
To yield anything on this point would seem
to me a piece of mean utilitarianism. I
hate everything that savours of cajoling
and coaxing. All such ways are mere at-
tempts to throw dust in men’s eyes, mere
forms of coquetry and stratagem. A pro-

274 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

fessor is the priest of his subject ; he should
do the honours of it gravely and with

dignity. ©

9th September 1879. —‘Non-being is
perfect. Being, imperfect:’ this horrible
sophism becomes beautiful only in the Pla-
tonic system, because there Non-being is
replaced by the Idea, which is, and which
is divine.

The ideal, the chimerical, the vacant,
should not be allowed to claim so great a
superiority to the Real, which, on its side,
has the incomparable advantage of existing.
The Ideal kills enjoyment and content by
disparaging the present and actual. It is
the voice which says No, like Mephisto-
pheles. No, you have not succeeded; no,
your work is not good; no, you are not
happy; no, you shall not find rest ;—all
that you see and all that you do is insuffi-
cient, insignificant, overdone, badly done,
imperfect. The thirst for the ideal is like
the goad of Siva, which only quickens life
to hasten death. Incurable longing that it
is, it lies at the root both of individual
suffering and of the progress of the race.
It destroys happiness in the name of dig-
nity.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 275)

The only positive good is order, the re-
turn therefore to order and to a state of
equilibrium. Thought without action is an
evil, and so is action without thought. The
ideal is a poison unless it be fused with the
real, and the real becomes corrupt without
the perfume of the ideal. Nothing is good
singly without its complement and its con-
trary. Self-examination is dangerous if it
encroaches upon self-devotion; roverie is
hurtful when it stupefies the will; gentle-
ness is an evil when it lessens strength;
contemplation is fatal when it destroys
character. ‘Too much’ and ‘too little’
sin equally against wisdom. Excess is one
evil, apathy another. Duty may be defined
as energy tempered by moderation ; happi-
ness, as inclination calmed and tempered
by self-control.

Just as life is only lent us for a few years,
but is not inherent in us, so the good which
is in us is not our own. It is not difficult
to think of oneself in this detached spirit.
It only needs a little self-knowledge, a little
intuitive perception of the ideal, a little re-
ligion. There is even much sweetness in
this conception that we are nothing of our-
selves, and that yet it is granted to us to

276 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

summon each other to life, joy, poetry and
holiness.

Another application of the law of irony:
Zeno, a fatalist by theory, makes his dis-
ciples heroes: Epicurus, the upholder of
liberty, makes his disciples languid and
effeminate. ‘The ideal pursued is the deci-
sive point ; the Stoical ideal is duty, whereas
the Epicureans make an ideal out of an
interest. Two tendencies, two systems of
morals, two worlds. In the same way the
Jansenists, and before them the great re-
formers, are for predestination, the Jesuits
for free-will,—and yet the first founded
liberty, the second slavery of conscience.
What matters then is not the theoretical
principle; it is the secret tendency, the
aspiration, the aim, which is the essential
thing.

At every epoch there lies, beyond the
domain of what man knows, the domain
of the unknown, in which faith has its
dwelling. Faith has no proofs, but only
itself, to offer. It is born spontaneously
in certain commanding souls; it spreads
its empire among the rest by imitation
and contagion. A great faith is but a

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 277

great hope which becomes certitude as we
move farther and farther from the founder
of it; time and distance strengthen it, until
at last the passion for knowledge seizes
upon it, questions, and examines it. Then
all which had once made its strength be-
comes its weakness; the impossibility of
Faint exaltation of pre distance.
At we age is our view givavents our
eye truest? Surely in old age, before the
infirmities come which weaken or embitter.
The ancients were right. The old man
who is at once sympathetic and disinter-
ested, necessarily develops the spirit of
eontemplation, and it is given to the spirit
of contemplation to see things most truly,
because it alone perceives them in their
relative and proportional value.

2d January 1880.—A sense of rest, of
deep quiet even. Silence within and with-
out. A quietly-burning fire. A sense of
comfort. The portrait of my mother seems
to smile upon me. I am not dazed or
stupid, but only happy in this peaceful
morning. Whatever may be the charm of
emotion, I do not know whether it equals
the sweetness of those hours of silent medi-

278 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

tation, in which we have a glimpse and
foretaste of the contemplative joys of Para-
dise. Desire and fear, sadness and care,
are done away. Existence is reduced to
the simplest form, the most ethereal mode
of being, that is, to pure self-consciousness.
It is a state of harmony, without tension
and without disturbance, the dominical state
of the soul, perhaps the state which awaits
it beyond the grave. It is happiness as the
Orientals understand it, the happiness of
the anchorite, who neither struggles nor
wishes any more, but simply adores and
enjoys. It is difficult to find words in
which to express this moral situation, for
our languages can only render the particular
and localised vibrations of life; they are
incapable of expressing this motionless con-
centration, this divine quietude, this state
of the resting ocean, which reflects the sky,
and is master of its own profundities.
Things are then re-absorbed into their
principles ; memories are swallowed up in
memory; the soul is only soul, and is no
longer conscious of itself in its individuality
and separateness. It is something which
feels the universal life, a sensible atom
of the Divine, of God. It no longer appro-
priates anything to itself, it is conscious of

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 279

no void. Only the Yoghis and Soufis per-
haps have known in its profundity this
humble and yet voluptuous: state, which
combines the joys of being and of non-
being, which is neither reflection nor will,
which is above both the moral existence
and the intellectual existence, which is the
return to unity, to the pleroma, the vision
of Plotinus and of Proclus, — Nirvana in
its most attractive form.

It is clear that the western nations in gen-
eral, and especially the Americans, know
very little of this state of feeling. For them
life is devouring and incessant activity.
They are eager for gold, for power, for
dominion ; their aim is to crush men and
to enslave nature. They show an obstinate
interest in means, and have not a thought
for the end. They confound being with
individual being, and the expansion of the
self with happiness, —that is to say, they
do not live by the soul; they ignore the
unchangeable and the eternal ; they live at
the periphery of their being, because they
are unable to penetrate to its axis. They are
excited, ardent, positive, because they are
superficial. Why so much effort, noise,
struggle, and greed?—it is all a mere
stunning and deafening of the self. When

280 AMIEL’S JOURNAL:

death comes they recognise that it is so, —

; Why not then admit it sooner? Activity is

\/ only beautiful when it is holy —that is to

\\ say, when it is spent in the servive of that
which passeth not away.

6th February 1880.—A feeling article
by Edmond Schérer on the death of Bersot,
the director of the ‘ Ecole Normale,’ a phi-
losopher who bore like a stoic a terrible
disease, and who laboured to the last with-
out a complaint. ... Ihave just read the
four orations delivered over his grave.
They have brought the tears to my eyes.
In the last days of this brave man every-
thing was manly, noble, moral, and spirit-
ual. Each of the speakers paid homage to
the character, the devotion, the constancy,
and the intellectual elevation of the dead.
‘Let us learn from him how to live and
how to die.” The whole funeral ceremony
had an antique dignity.

7th February 1880.— Hoar-frost and fog,
but the general aspect is bright and fairy-
like, and has nothing in common with the
gloom in Paris and London, of which the
newspapers tell us.

This silvery landscape has a dreamy grace,

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 281

a fanciful charm, which is unknown both
to the countries of the sun and to those
of coal-smoke. The trees seem to belong
to another creation, in which white has
taken the place of green. As one gazes at
these,alleys, these clumps, these groves and
arcades, these lace-like garlands and fes-
toons, one feels no wish for anything else ;
their beauty is original and self-sufficing,
all the more because the ground powdered
with snow, the sky dimmed with mist, and
the smooth soft distances, combine to form,
a general scale of colour, and a harmonious
whole, which charms the eye. No harsh-
ness anywhere — all is velvet. My enchant-
ment beguiled me out both before and after
dinner. The impression is that of a féte,
and the subdued tints are, or seem to be,
a mere coquetry of winter which has set
itself to paint something without sunshine,
and yet to charm the spectator.

9th February 1880. — Life rushes on —
so much the worse for the weak and the
stragglers. As soon as a man’s tendo
Achillis gives way he finds himself trampled
under foot by the young, the eager, the
voracious. ‘Vae victis, vae debilibus!?
yells the crowd, which in its turn is storm-

282 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

ing the goods of this world. Every man
is always in some other man’s way, since,
however small he may make himself, he
still occupies some space, and however
little he may envy or possess, he is still
sure to be envied and his goods coveted by
some one else. Mean world !— peopled
by amean race! To console ourselves we
must think of the exceptions — of the noble
and generous souls. There aresuch. What
do the rest matter ! —The traveller crossing
the desert feels himself surrounded by
creatures thirsting for his blood; by day
vultures fly about his head; by night scor-
pions creep into his tent, jackals prowl
around his camp-fire, mosquitoes prick and
torture him with their greedy sting; every-
where menace, enmity, ferocity. But far
beyond the horizon, and the barren sands
peopled by these hostile hordes, the way-
farer pictures to himself a few loved faces
and kind looks, a few true hearts which
follow him in their dreams —and smiles. —
When all is said, indeed, we defend our-
selves a greater or lesser number of years,
but we are always conquered and devoured
in the end; there is no escaping the grave
and its worm. Destruction is our destiny,
and oblivion our portion. ...

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 283

How near is the great gulf! My skiff is
thin as a nutshell, or even more fragile
still. Let the leak but widen a little and
all is over for the navigator. A mere
nothing separates me from idiocy, from
madness, from death. The slightest breach
is enough to endanger all this frail, ingen-
ious edifice, which calls itself my being
and my life.

Not even the dragonfly symbol is enough
to express its frailty ; the soap-bubble is
the best poetical translation of all this
illusory magnificence, this fugitive appari-
tion of the tiny self, which is we, and
we it.

. . . Amiserable night enough. Awak-
ened three or four times by my bronchitis.
Sadness — restlessness. One of these win-
ter nights, possibly, suffocation will come.
I realise that it would be well to keep
myself ready, to put everything in order.

To begin with, let me wipe out all
personal grievances and bitternesses; for-
give all, judge no one; ih enmity and ill-
will, see only misunderstanding. ‘As much
as lieth in you, be at peace with all men.’
On the bed of death the soul should have
no eyes but for eternal things. All the

284 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

littlenesses of life disappear. The fight is
over. There should be nothing left now
but remembrance of past blessings, — adora-
tion of the ways of God. Our natural in-
stinct leads us back to Christian humility
and pity. ‘Father, forgive us our tres-
passes, as we forgive them who trespass
against us.’

Prepare thyself as though the coming
Easter were thy last, for thy days hence-
forward shall be few and evil.

1lth February 1880.— Victor de La-
prade has elevation, grandeur, nobility,
and harmony. What is it, then, that he
lacks ? Ease, and perhaps humour. Hence
the monotonous solemnity, the excess of
emphasis, the over-intensity, the inspired
air, the statue-like gait, which annoy one
in him. He is a muse which never lays
aside the cothurnus, and a royalty which
never puts off its crown, even to sleep.
The total absence in him of playfulness,
simplicity, familiarity, is a great defect.
De Laprade is*to the ancients as the
French tragedy is to that of Euripides, or
as the wig of Louis XIV. to the locks of
Apollo. His majestic airs are wearisome
and factitious. If there is not exactly

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 285

affectation in them, there is at least a kind
of theatrical and sacerdotal posing, a sort
of professional attitudinising. Truth is
not as fine as this, but it is more living,
more pathetic, more varied. Marble images
are cold. Was it not Musset who said,
‘If De Laprade is a poet, then I am not
one’ ?

27th February 1880.—I have finished
translating twelve or fourteen little poems
by Petofi. They have a strange kind of
savour. There is something of the Steppe,
of the East, of Mazeppa, of madness, in
these songs, which seem to go to the beat
of a riding-whip. What force and passion,
what savage brilliancy, what wild and
grandiose images, there are in them! One
feels that the Magyar is a kind of Centaur,
and that he is only Christian and European
by accident. The Hun in him tends towards
the Arab.

20th March 1880.—I have been reading
La Banniére Bleue —a history of the world
at the time of Genghis Khan, under the
form of memoirs. It is a Turk, Ouigour,
who tells the story. He shows us civilisa-
tion from the wrong side, or the other side,

286 AMIEL’S JOURNAL:

and the Asiatic nomads appear as the
scavengers of its corruptions.

Genghis proclaimed himself the scourge
of God, and he did in fact realise the vast-
est empire known to history, stretching
from the Blue Sea to the Baltic, and from
the vast plains of Siberia to the banks of
the sacred Ganges. The most solid em-
pires of the ancient world were overthrown
by the tramp of his horsemen and the
shafts of his archers. From the tumult
into which he threw the western continent
there issued certain vast results: the fall
of the Byzantine Empire, involving the
Renaissance, the voyages of discovery in
Asia, undertaken from both sides of the
globe — that is to say, Gama and Columbus;
the formation of the Turkish Empire ; and
the preparation of the Russian Empire.
This tremendous hurricane, starting from
the high Asiatic tablelands, felled the de
caying oaks and worm-eaten buildings of
the whole ancient world. ‘The descent of
the yellow, flat-nosed Mongofs upon Europe
is a historical cyclone which devastated and
purified our thirteenth century, and broke,
at the two ends of the known world,
through two great Chinese walls—that
which protected the ancient empire of the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 287

Centre, and that which made a barrier of
ignorance and superstition round the little
world of Christendom. Attila, Genghis,
Tamerlane, ought to range in the memory
of men with Cesar, Charlemagne, and
Napoleon. They roused whole peoples
into action, and stirred the depths of
human life, they powerfully affected eth-
nography, they let loose rivers of blood, and
renewed the face of things. The Quakers
will not see that there is a law of tempests
in history as in Nature. The revilers of
war are like the revilers of thunder, storms,
and voleanoes; they know not what they
do. Civilisation tends to corrupt men, as
large towns tend to vitiate the air.

‘Nos patimur longe pacis mala.’

Catastrophes bring about a violent resto-
ration of equilibrium; they put the world
brutally to rights. Evil chastises itself,
and the tendency to ruin in human things
supplies the place of the regulator who has
not yet been discovered. No civilisation
can bear more than a certain proportion of
abuses, injustice, corruption, shame, and
crime. When this proportion has been
reached, the boiler bursts, the palace falls,
the scaffolding breaks down; institutions,

288 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

cities, states, empires, sink into ruin. The
evil contained in an organism is a virus
which preys upon it, and if it is not elimi-
nated ends by destroying it. And as noth-
ing is perfect, nothing can escape death.

19th May 1880.— Inadaptablility, due
either to mysticism or stiffness, delicacy or
disdain, is the misfortune or at all events
the characteristic of my life. I have not
been able to fit myself to anything, to con-
tent myself with anything. I have never
had the quantum of illusion necessary for
risking the irreparable. I have made use
of the ideal itself to keep me from any kind
of bondage. It was thus with marriage:
only perfection would have satisfied me ;
and, on the other hand, I was not worthy
of perfection. . . . So that, finding no
satisfaction in things, I tried to extirpate
desire, by which things enslave us. Inde-
pendence has been my refuge; detachment
my stronghold. I have lived the impersonal
life, —in the world, yet not in it, thinking
much, desiring nothing. It is a state of
mind which corresponds with what in
women is called a broken heart; and it is
in fact like it, since the characteristic com-
mon to both is despair. When one knows

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 289

that one will never possess what one could
have loved, and that one can be content
with nothing less, one has, so to speak, left
the world, one has cut the golden hair,
parted with all that makes human life —
that is to say, illusion — the incessant effort
towards an apparently attainable end.

81st May 1880.—Let us not be over-
ingenious. There is no help to be got out
of subtleties. Besides, one must live. It
is best and simplest not to quarrel with any
illusion, and to accept the inevitable good-
temperedly. Plunged as we are in human
existence, we must take it as it comes, not
too bitterly, nor too tragically, without hor-
ror and without sarcasm, without misplaced
petulance or a too exacting expectation ;
cheerfulness, serenity, and patience, these
are best,—let us aim at these. Our busi-
ness is to treat life as the grandfather treats
his granddaughter, or the grandmother her
grandson; to enter into the pretences of
childhood and the fictions of youth, even
when we ourselves have long passed beyond
them. It is probable that God Himself
looks kindly upon the illusions of the
human race, so long as they are innocent.
There is nothing evil but sin — that is, ego-

290 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

tism and revolt. And as for error, man
changes his errors frequently, but error of
some sort is always with him. Travel as
one may, one is always somewhere, and
one’s mind rests on some point of truth,
as one’s feet rest upon some point of the
globe.

Society alone represents a more or less
complete unity. The individual must con-
tent himself with being a stone in the
building, a wheel in the immense machine,
a word in the poem. He is a part of the
family, of the State, of humanity, of all
the special fragments formed by human
interests, beliefs, aspirations, and labours.
The loftiest souls are those who are con~
scious of the universal symphony, and who
give their full and willing collaboration to
this vast and complicated concert which we
call civilisation.

In principle the mind is capable of sup-
pressing all the limits which it discovers in
itself, limits of language, nationality, relig-
ion, race, or epoch. But it must be ad-
mitted that the more the mind spiritualises
and generalises itself, the less hold it has
on other minds, which no longer understand
it or know what to do with it. Influence
belongs to men of action, and for purposes

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 29t

of action nothing is more useful than nar-
rowness of thought combined with energy
of will.

The forms of dreamland are gigantic,
those of action are small and dwarfed. To
the minds imprisoned in things, belong suc-
cess, fame, profit; a great deal no doubt;
but they know nothing of the pleasures of
liberty or the joy of penetrating the infinite.
However, I do not mean to put one class
before another; for every man is happy
according to his nature. History is made
by combatants and specialists; only it is
perhaps not a bad thing that in the midst
of the devouring activities of the western
world, there should be a few Brahmanising
souls.

... This soliloquy means— what? That
reverie turns upon itself as dreams do;
that impressions added together do not
always produce a fair judgment; that a
private journal is like a good king, and
permits repetitions, outpourings, complaint.
. .. These unseen effusions are the con-
versation of thought with itself, the arpeg-
gios, involuntary but not unconscious, of
that /olian harp we bear within us. Its
vibrations compose no piece, exhaust no
theme, achieve no melody, carry out no

292 _ AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

programme, but they express the innermost
life of man.

1st June 1880.— Stendhal’s La Chartreuse
de Parme. A remarkable book. It is even
typical, the first of a class. Stendhal opens
the series of naturalist novels, which sup-
press the intervention of the moral sense,
and scoff at the claim of free-will. Individ-
uals are irresponsible ; they are governed by
their passions, and the play of human pas-
sions is the observer’s joy, the artist’s ma-
terial. Stendhal is a novelist after Taine’s
heart, a faithful painter who is neither
touched nor angry, and whom everything
amuses — the knave and the adventuress as
well as honest men and women, but who
has neither faith, nor preference, nor ideal.
In him literature is subordinated to natural
history, to science. It no longer forms part
of the humanities, it no longer gives man
the honour of a separate rank. It classes
him with the ant, the beaver, and the
monkey. And this moral indifference to
morality leads direct to immorality. -

The vice of the whole school is cynicism,
contempt for.-man, whom they degrade to
the level of the brute; it is the worship
of strength, disregard of the soul, a want

AMIEL’S JOURNAL 293

of generosity, of reverence, of nobility,
which shows itself in spite of all protesta-
tions to the contrary ; in a word, it is inhu-
manity. No man can be a naturalist with
impunity: he will be coarse even with the
most refined culture. A free mind is a
great thing no doubt, but loftiness of heart,
belief in goodness, capacity for enthusiasm
and devotion, the thirst after perfection
and holiness, are greater things still.

7th June 1880. —I am reading Madame
Necker de Saussure! again. L’ Education
progressive is an admirable book. What
moderation and fairness of view, what rea-
sonableness and dignity of manner! Every-
thing in it is of high quality, — observation,
thought, and style. The reconciliation of
science with the ideal, of philosophy with
religion, of psychology with morals, which
the book attempts, is sound and beneficent.
It is a fine book —a classic — and Geneva
may be proud of a piece of work which
shows such high cultivation and so much
solid wisdom. Here we have the true
Genevese literature, the central tradition
of the country.

Later. —I have finished the third volume

294 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

of Madame Necker. The elevation and
delicacy, the sense and seriousness, the
beauty and perfection of the whole, are
astonishing. A few harshnesses or inaccu-
racies of language do not matter. I feel for
the author a respect mingled with emotion.
How rare it is to find a book in which every-
thing is sincere and everything is true!

26th June 1880.— Democracy exists; it
is mere loss of time to dwell upon its ab-
surdities and defects. Every régime has its
weaknesses, and this régime is a lesser evil
than others. On things its effect is unfa-
vourable, but on the other hand men profit
by it, for it develops the individual by
obliging every one to take interest in a
multitude of questions. It makes bad work,
but it produces citizens. This is its excuse,
and a more than tolerable one; in the eyes
of the philanthropist, indeed, it is a serious
title to respect, for, after all, social institu-
tions are made for man, and not vice versa.

27th June 1880.—I paid a visit.to my
friends ——, and we resumed the conver-
sation of yesterday. We talked of the ills
which threaten democracy and which are’
derived from the legal fiction at the root of

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 295

it. Surely the remedy consists in insisting
everywhere upon the truth which democ-
racy systematically forgets, and which is its
proper makeweight,—on the inequalities
of talent, of virtue, and merit, and on the
respect due to age, to capacity, to services
rendered... Juvenile arrogance and jealous
ingratitude must be resisted all the more
strenuously because social forms are in
their favour ; and when the institutions of
a country lay stress only on the rights of
the individual, it is the business of the citi-
zen to lay all the more stress on duty.
There must be a constant effort to correct
the prevailing tendency of things. All this,
it is true, is nothing but palliative, but in
human society one cannot hope for more.

Later.— Alfred de Vigny is a sympa-
thetic writer, with a meditative turn of
thought, a strong and supple talent. He
possesses elevation, independence, serious-
ness, originality, boldness and grace; he
has something of everything. He paints,
describes, and judges well; he thinks, and
has the courage of his opinions. His defect
lies in an excess of self-respect, in a British
pride and reserve which give him a horror
of familiarity and a terror of letting him-

296 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

self go. This tendency has naturally in-
jured his popularity as a writer with a
public whom he holds at arm’s length as~
one might a troublesome crowd. The
French race has never cared much about
the inviolability of personal conscience ; it
does not like stoics shut up in their own
dignity as in a tower, and recognising no
master but God, duty or faith. Such strict-
ness annoys and irritates it; it is merely
piqued and made impatient by anything
solemn. It repudiated Protestantism for
this very reason, and in all crises it has
crushed those who have not yielded to the
passionate current of opinion.

1st July 1880 (Three o’clock).— The
temperature is oppressive; I ought to be
looking over my notes, and thinking of to-
morrow’s examinations. Inward distaste —
emptiness — discontent. Is it trouble of
conscience, or sorrow of heart ? or the soul
preying upon itself? or merely a sense of
strength decaying and time running to
waste? Is sadness —or regret — or fear —
at the root of it? I do not know; but
this dull sense of misery has danger in it;
it leads to rash efforts and mad decisions.
Oh for escape from self, for something to

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 297

stifle the importunate voice of want and
yearning! Discontent is the father of
temptation. How can we gorge the invis-
ible serpent hidden at the bottom of our
well, — gorge it so that it may sleep ?

At the heart of all this rage and vain
rebellion there lies— what? Aspiration,
yearning! We are athirst for the infinite
—for love—for I know not what. It is
the instinct of happiness, which, like some
wild animal, is restless for its prey. It is
God calling — God avenging Himself.

4th July 1880 (Sunday, half-past eight
in the morning). — The sun has come out
after heavy rain. May one take it as an
omen on this solemn day ? The great voice
of Clémence has just been sounding in our
ears. The bell’s deep vibrations went to
my heart. For a quarter of an hour the
pathetic appeal went on — ‘ Geneva, Geneva,
remember! I am called Clémence —I am
the voice of Church and of Country. People
of Geneva, serve God and be at peace
together.’ *

* A law to bring about separation between Church
and State, adopted by- the Great Council, was on this
Gay submitted to the vote of the Genevese people.

It was rejected by a large majority (9306 against
4044).— [S.]

298 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Seven o'clock in the evening. — Clémence
has been ringing again, during the last
half-hour of the scrutin. Now that she has
stopped, the silence has a terrible serious-
ness, like that which weighs upon a crowd
when it is waiting for the return of the
judge and the delivery of the death sen-
tence. The fate of the Genevese church
and country is now in the voting box,

Eleven o'clock in the evening. — Victory
along the whole line. The Ayes have
carried little more than two-sevenths of the
vote. At my friend ——’s house I found
them all full of excitement, "gratitude, and

joy.

5th July 1880.— There are some words
which have still a magical virtue with the
mass of the people: those of State, Republic,
Country, Nation, Flag, and even, I think,
Church. Our sceptical and mocking culture
knows nothing of the emotion, the exalta-
tion, the delirium, which these words
awaken in simple people. The dlasés of
the world have no idea how the popular
mind vibrates to these appeals, by which
they themselves are untouched. It is their
punishment; it is also their infirmity.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 299

Their temper is satirical and separatist ;
they live in isolation and sterility.

I feel again what I felt at the time of the
Rousseau centenary ; my feeling and imag-
ination are chilled and repelled by those
Pharisaical people who think themselves
too good to associate with the crowd.

At the same time, I suffer from an in-
ward contradiction, from a twofold, instinc-
tive repugnance —an esthetic repugnance
towards vulgarity of every kind, a moral
repugnance towards barrenness and cold-
ness of heart.

So that personally I am only attracted
by the individuals of cultivation and emi-
nence, while on the other hand nothing is
sweeter to me than to feel myself vibrating
in sympathy with the national spirit, with
the feeling of the masses. I only care for
the two extremes, and it is this which sep-
arates me from each of them.

Our everyday life, split up as it is into
clashing parties and opposed opinions, and
harassed by perpetual disorder and discus-
sion, is painful and almost hateful to me.
A thousand things irritate and provoke me.
But perhaps it would be the same else-
where. Very likely it is the inevitable way
of the world which displeases me — the

300 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

sight of what succeeds, of what men ap-
prove or blame, of what they excuse or
accuse. I need to admire, to feel myself
in sympathy and in harmony with my
neighbour, with the march of things, and
the tendencies of those around me, and al-
most always I have had to give up the hope
of it. I take refuge in retreat, to avoid
discord. But solitude is only a pis-aller.

6th July 1880. — Magnificent weather.
The college prize-day.* Towards evening
I went with our three ladies to the plain of
Plainpalais. There was an immense crowd,
and I was struck with the bright look of
the faces. The festival wound up with the ~
traditional fireworks, under a calm and
starry sky. Here we have the Republic
indeed, I thought as I came in. For a
whole week this people has been out-of-
doors, camping, like the Athenians on the
Agora. Since Wednesday lectures and
public meetings have followed one another
without intermission; at home there are
pamphlets and the newspapers to be read;
while speech-making goes on at the clubs.
On Sunday, plebiscite ; Monday, public pro-

* The prize-giving at the College of Geneva is
made the occasion of a national festival.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 301

cession, service at St. Pierre, speeches on
the Molard, festival for the adults. ‘Tues-
day, the college féte-day. Wednesday, the
féte-day of the primary schools.

Geneva is a cauldron always at boiling-
point, a furnace of which the fires are
never extinguished. Vulcan had more than
one forge, and Geneva is certainly one of
those world-anvils on which the greatest
number of projects have been hammered
out. When one thinks that the martyrs
of all causes have been at work here, the
mystery is explained a little ; but the truest
explanation is that Geneva, — republican,
protestant, democratic, learned, and enter-
prising Geneva — has for centuries depended
on herself alone for the solution of her own
difficulties. Since the Reformation she has
been always on the alert, marching with a
lantern in her left hand and a sword in her
right. It pleases me to see that she has
not yet become a mere copy of anything,
and that she is still capable of deciding for
herself. Those who say to her, ‘Do as
they do at New York, at Paris, at Rome,
at Berlin,’ are still in the minority. The
doctrinaires who would split her up and
destroy her unity waste their breath upon
her. She divines the snare laid for her

302 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

and turns away. I like this proof of vital-
ity. Only that which is original has a suffi-
cient reason for existence. A country in
which the word of command comes from
elsewhere is nothing more than a province.
This is what our Jacobins and our Ultra-
montanes never will recognise. Neither of
them understand the meaning of self-govy-
ernment, and neither of them have any
idea of the dignity of a historical state and
an independent people.

Our small nationalities are ruined by the
hollow cosmopolitan formule which have
an equally disastrous effect upon art and
letters. The modern isms are so many
acids which dissolve everything living and
concrete. No one achieves a masterpiece,
nor even a decent piece of work, by the
help of realism, liberalism, or romanticism.
Separatism has even less virtue than any of
the other isms, for it is the abstraction of
a negation, the shadow of a shadow. The
various isms of the present are not fruitful
principles: they are hardly even explana-
tory formule. They are rather names of
disease, for they express some element in
excess, some dangerous and abusive exag-
geration. Examples: empiricism, idealism,
radicalism. What is best among things and

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 303

most perfect among beings slips through
these categories. The man who is perfectly
well is neither sanguineous — [to use the
old medical term] —nor bilious nor ner-
vous. A normal republic contains opposing
parties and points of view, but it contains
them, as it were, in a state of chemical
combination. All the colours are contained
in a ray of light, while red alone does not
contain a sixth part of the perfect ray.

8th July 1880.—It is thirty years since ,
I read Waagen’s book on Museums, which
my friend is now reading. It was in
1842 that I was wild for pictures; in 1845
that I was studying Krause’s philosophy ;
in 1850 that I became professor of esthetics.
—— may be the same age as I am;; it is
none the less true that when a particular
stage has become to me a matter of history,
he is just arriving at it. This impression
of distance and remoteness is a strange one.
I begin to realise that my memory is a
great catacomb, and that below my actual
standing-ground there is layer after layer
of historical ashes.

Is the life of mind something like that of
great trees of immemorial growth? Is the
living ‘ayer of consciousness superimposed

304 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead ?
No doubt this is too much to say, but still,
when memory is slack the past becomes
almost as though it had never been. To
remember that we did know once is not a
sign of possession but a sign of loss; it is
like the number of an engraving which is
no longer on its nail, the title of a volume
no longer to be found on its shelf. My
mind is the empty frame of a thousand
vanished images. Sharpened by incessant
training, it is all culture, but it has retained
hardly anything in its meshes. It is without
matter, and is only form. It no longer has
knowledge; it has become method. It is
etherealised, algebraicised. Life has treated
it as death treats other minds ; it has al-
ready prepared it fora further metamor-
phosis. Since the age of sixteen onwards
I have been able to look at things with the
eyes of a blind man recently operated upon
—that is to say, I have been able to sup-
press in myself the results of the long edu-
cation of sight, and to abolish distances ;
and now I find myself regarding existence
as though from beyond the tomb, from an-
other world ; all is strange to me; I am, as
it were, outside my own body and individu-
ality; I am depersonalised, detached, cut

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 305

adrift. —Is this madness? No. Madness
means the impossibility of recovering one’s
normal balance after the mind has thus
played truant among alien forms of being,
and followed Dante to invisible worlds.
Madness means incapacity for self-judgment
and self-control. Whereas it seems to me
that my mental transformations are but
philosophical experiences. I am tied to
none. Iam but making psychological inves-
tigations. At the same time I do not hide
from myself that such experiences weaken
the hold of common sense, because they act
as solvents of all personal interests and prej-
udices. I can only defend myself against
them by returning to the common life of
men, and by bracing and fortifying the will.

14th July 1880. — What is the book which,
of all Genevese literature, I would soonest
have written? Perhaps that of Madame
Necker de Saussure, or Madame de Staél’s
LT’ Allemagne. To a Genevese, moral phi-
losophy is still the most congenial and
remunerative of studies. Intellectual seri-
ousness is what suits us least ill. History,
polities, economical science, education,
practical philosophy — these are our sub-
jects. We have everything to lose in the

306 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

attempt to make ourselves mere Frenchified
copies of the Parisians: by so doing we are
merely carrying water to the Seine. Inde-
pendent criticism is perhaps easier at
Geneva than at Paris, and Geneva ought to
remain faithful to her own special line,
which, as compared with that of France, is
one of greater freedom from the tyranny of
taste and fashion on the one hand, and the
tyranny of ruling opinion on the other — of
Catholicism or Jacobinism. Geneva should
be to La Grande Nation what Diogenes was
to Alexander ; her réle is to represent the in-
dependent thought and the free speech which
is not dazzled by prestige, and does not blink
the truth. It is true that the réle is an un-
grateful one, that it lends itself to sarcasm
and misrepresentation — but what matter ?

28th July 1880. — This afternoon I have
had a walk in the sunshine, and have just
come back rejoicing in a renewed commun-
ion with nature. The waters of the Rhone
and the Arve, the murmur of the river, the
austerity of its banks, the brilliancy of the
foliage, the play of the leaves, the splendour
of the July sunlight, the rich fertility of the
fields, the lucidity of the distant mountains,
the whiteness of the glaciers under the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 307

azure serenity of the sky, the sparkle and
foam of the mingling rivers, the leafy
masses of the La Batie woods—all and
everything delighted me. It seemed to me
as though the years of strength had come
back tome. I was overwhelmed with sen-
sations. I was surprised and grateful.
The universal life carried me on its breast ;
the summer’s caress went to my heart.
Once more,my eyes beheld the vast hori-
zons, the soaring peaks, the blue lakes, the
winding valleys, and all the free outlets of
old days. And yet there was no painful
sense of longing. The scene left upon
me an indefinable impression, which was
neither hope, nor desire, nor regret, but
rather a sense of emotion, of passionate
impulse, mingled with admiration and anx-
iety. I am conscious at once of joy and
of want; beyond what I possess I see the
impossible and the unattainable; I gauge
my own wealth and poverty: in a word, I
am and Iam not,—my inner state is one
‘of contradiction, because it is one of transi-
tion. The ambiguity of it is characteristic
of human nature, which is ambiguous, be-
cause it is flesh becoming spirit, space
changing into thought, the Finite looking
dimly out upon the Infinite, intelligence
working its way through love and pain.

308 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Man is the sensorium commune of nature,
the point at which all values are inter-
changed. Mind is the plastic medium, the
principle, and the result of all; at once
material and laboratory, product and for-
mula, sensation, expression, and law ; that
which is, that which does, that which knows.
Allis not mind, but mind is in all, and con-
tains all. It is the consciousness of being —
that is, Being raised to the second power. —
If the universe subsists, it is because the
Eternal mind loves to perceive its own con-
tent, in all its wealth and expansion — espe-
cially in its stages of preparation. Not that
God is an egotist. He allows myriads upon
myriads of suns to disport themselves in His
shadow ; He grants life and consciousness
to innumerable multitudes of creatures who
thus participate in being and in nature;
and all these animated monads multiply, so
to speak, His divinity.

4th August 1880.—I have read a few
numbers of the Feuille Centrale de Zojing-
en.* It is one of those perpetual new be-
ginnings of youth which thinks it is pro-

* The journal of a students’ society, drawn from
the different cantons of Switzerland, which meets
every year in the little town of Zofingen.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 309

ducing something fresh when it is only
repeating the old.

Nature is governed by continuity — the
continuity of repetition ; it is like an oft-
told tale, or the recurring burthen of a
song. The rose-trees are never tired of
rose-bearing, the birds of nest-building,
young hearts of loving, or young voices of
singing the thoughts and feelings which
have served their predecessors a hundred
thousand times before. Profound monot-
ony in universal movement, —there is the
simplest formula furnished by the spectacle
of the world. All circles are alike, and
every existence tends to trace its circle.

How, then, is fastidium to be avoided ?
By shutting our eyes to the general uni-
formity, by laying stress upon the small
differences which exist, and then by learn-
ing to enjoy repetition. What to the intel-
lect is old and worn-out is perennially young
and fresh to the heart ; curiosity is insati-
able, but love is never tired. The natural
preservative against satiety, too, is work.
What we do may weary others, but the
personal effort is at least useful to its
author. Where every one works, the gen-
eral life is sure to possess charm and savour,
even though it repeat for ever the same

310 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

song, the same aspirations, the same preju-
dices, and the same sighs. ‘To every man
his turn,’ is the motto of mortal beings.
If what they do is old, they themselves are
new; when they imitate, they think they
are inventing. They have received, and
they transmit. EH sempre bene!

24th August 1880.— As years go on I
love the beautiful more than the sublime,
the smooth more than the rough, the calm
nobility of Plato more than the fierce holi-
ness of the world’s Jeremiahs. The ve-
hement barbarian is to me the inferior of
the mild and playful Socrates. My taste is
for the well-balanced soul and the well-
trained heart —for a liberty which is not
harsh and insolent, like that of the newly
enfranchised slave, but lovable. The tem-
perament which charms me is that in which
one virtue leads naturally to another. All
exclusive and sharply-marked qualities are
but so many signs of imperfection.

29th August 1880.— To-day I am con-
scious of improvement. I am taking ad-
vantage of it to go back to my neglected
work and my interrupted habits; but in a
week I have grown several months older,

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 311

—that is easy to see. The affection of
those around me makes them pretend not
to see it; but the looking-glass tells the
truth. The fact does not take away from
the pleasure of convalescence ; but still one
hears in it the shuttle of destiny, and death
seems to be nearing rapidly, in spite of the
halts and truces which are granted one. —
The most beautiful existence, it seems to
me, would be that of a river which should
get through all its rapids and waterfalls not
far from its rising, and should then in its
widening course form a succession of rich
valleys, and in each of them a lake equally
but diversely beautiful, to end, after the
plains of age were past, in the ocean where
all that is weary and heavy-laden comes to
seek for rest. How few there are of these
full, fruitful, gentle lives! What is the use
of wishing for or regretting them? It is
wiser and harder to see in one’s own lot
the best one could have had, and to say to
oneself that after all the cleverest tailor
cannot make us a coat to fit us more closely
than our skin.

‘Le vrai nom du bonheur est le contentement.’

. . . The essential thing for every one is
to accept his destiny. Fate has deceived

312 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

you; you have sometimes grumbled at your
lot ; well, no more mutual reproaches ; go
to sleep in peace.

30th August 1880 (Two o'clock). — Rum-
blings of a grave and distant thunder,
The sky is gray but rainless; the sharp
little cries of the birds show agitation and
fear; one might imagine it the prelude to
a symphony or a catastrophe.

‘ Quel éclair te traverse, 6 mon coeur soucieux ? *

Strange —all the business of the im-
mediate neighbourhood is going on ; there
is even more movement than usual; and
yet all these noises are, as it were, held
suspended in the silence —in a soft, posi-
tive silence, which they cannot disguise —
silence akin to that which, in every town,
on one day of the week, replaces the vague
murmur of the labouring hive. Such silence
at such an hour is extraordinary. There is
something expectant, contemplative, almost
anxious in it. Are there days on which
‘the little breath’? of Job produces -more
effect than tempest ? on which a dull rum-
bling on the distant horizon is enough to
suspend the concert of voices, like the roar-
ing of a desert lion at the fall of night ?

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 313

9th September 1880.—It seems to me
that with the decline of my active force I
am becoming more purely spirit; every-
thing is growing transparent to me. I see
the types, the foundation of beings, the
sense of things.

All personal events, all particular experi-
ences, are to me texts for meditation, facts
to be generalised into laws, realities to be
reduced to ideas. Life is only a document
to be interpreted, matter to be spiritualised.
Such is the life of the thinker. Every day
he strips himself more and more of person-
ality. If he consents to act and to feel, it
is that he may the better understand ; if
he wills, it is that he may know what will
is. Although it is sweet to him to be loved,
and he knows nothing else so sweet, yet
there also he seems to himself to be the
occasion of the phenomenon rather than its
end. He contemplates the spectacle of love,
and love for him remains a spectacle. He
does not even believe his body his own ; he
feels the vital whirlwind passing through
him, — lent to him, as it were, for a
moment, in order that he may perceive the
cosmic vibrations. He is a mere thinking
subject ; he retains only the form of things ;
he attributes to himself the material pos-

314 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

session of nothing whatsoever; he asks
nothing from life but wisdom. This temper
of mind makes him incomprehensible to all
that loves enjoyment, dominion, possession.
He is fluid as a phantom that we see but
cannot grasp; he resembles a man, as the
manes of Achilles or the shade of Creusa
resembled the living. Without having died,
I am a ghost. Other men are dreams to
me, and I am a dream to them.

Later. — Consciousness in me takes no
account of the category of time, and there-
fore all those partitions which tend to make
of life a palace with a thousand rooms, do
not exist in my case; I am still in the
primitive unicellular state. I possess my-
self only as Monad and as Ego, and I feel
my faculties themselves reabsorbed into the
substance which they have individualised.
All the endowment of animality is, so to
speak, repudiated ; all the product of study
and of cultivation is in the same way an- .
nulled ; the whole crystallisation is redis-
solved into fluid; the whole rainbow is
withdrawn within the dewdrop; conse-
quences return to the principle, effects-to
the cause, the bird to the egg, the organism
to its germ.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. ais

This psychological reinvolution is an an-
ticipation of death ; it represents the life
beyond the grave, the return to Scheol, the
soul fading into the world of ghosts, or
descending into the region of Die Miitter ;
it implies the simplification of the individ-
ual who, allowing all the accidents of per-
- sonality to evaporate, exists henceforward
only in the indivisible state, the state of
point, of potentiality, of pregnant nothing-
ness. Is not this the true definition of
mind ? is not mind, dissociated from space
and time, just this ? Its development, past
or future, is contained in it just as a curve
is contained in its algebraical formula.
This nothing is an all. This punctum
without dimensions is a punctum saliens.
What is the acorn but the oak which has
lost its branches, its leaves, its trunk, and
its roots — that is to say, all its apparatus,
its forms, its particularities — but which is
still present in concentration, in essence,
in a force which contains the possibility of
complete revival ?

This impoverishment, then, is only su-
perficially a loss, a reduction. To be re-
duced to those elements in one which are
eternal, is indeed to die, but not to be anni-
hilated : it is simply to become virtual again.

316 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

9th October 1880 (Clarens). — A walk.
Deep feeling and admiration. Nature was
so beautiful, so caressing, so poetical, so
maternal. The sunlight, the leaves, the
sky, the bells, all said to me, —‘ Be of good
strength and courage, poor bruised one.
This is nature’s kindly season; here is
forgetfulness, calm, and rest. Faults and.
troubles, anxieties and regrets, cares and
wrongs, are but one and the same burden.
We make no distinctions ; we comfort all
sorrows, we bring peace, and with us is
consolation. Salvation to the weary, salva-
tion to the afflicted, salvation to the sick,
to sinners, to all that suffer in heart, in
conscience, and in body. We are the foun-
tain of blessing; drink and live! _ God
maketh His sun to rise upon the just and
upon the unjust. There is nothing grudging
in His munificence ; He does not weigh His
gifts like a money-changer, or number them
like a cashier. Come,—there is enough
for all!’

29th October 1880 (Geneva). — The ideal
which a man professes may itself be only a
matter of appearance —a device for mis-
leading his neighbour, or deluding himself.
The individual is always ready to claim

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 317

for himself the merits of the badge under
which he fights ; whereas, generally speak-
ing, it is the contrary which happens. The
nobler the badge, the less estimable is the
wearer of it. Such at least is the presump-
tion. It is extremely dangerous to pride
oneself on any moral or religious specialty
whatever. Tell me what you pique yourself
upon, and I will tell you what you are not.

But how are we to know what an indi-
vidual is? First of all by his acts; but
by something else too—something which
is only perceived by intuition. Soul judges
soul by elective affinity, reaching through
and beyond both words and silence, looks
and actions.

The criterion is subjective, I allow, and
liable to error ; but in the first place there
is no safer one, and in the next, the accu-
racy of the judgment is in proportion to the
moral culture of the judge. Courage is an
authority on courage, goodness on goodness,
nobleness on nobleness, loyalty on upright~-
ness. We only truly know what we have, or
what we have lost and regret, as, for ex-
ample, childish innocence, virginal purity,
or stainless honour. The truest and best
judge, then, is Infinite Goodness, and next
to it, the regenerated sinner or the saint,

318 AMIEL’S JOURNAL,

the man tried by experience or the sage.
Naturally, the touchstone in us becomes
finer and truer the better we are.

38d November 1880. — What impression
has the story I have just read made upon
me? A mixed one. The imagination gets
no pleasure out of it, although the intellect
is amused. Why? Because the author's
mood is one of incessant irony and persi-
jflage. The Voltairean tradition has been
his guide —a great deal of wit and satire,
very little feeling, no simplicity. It is a
combination of qualities which serves emi-
nently well for satire, for journalism, and
for paper warfare of all kinds, but which is
much less suitable to the novel or short
story, for cleverness is not poetry, and the
novel is still within the domain of poetry,
although on the frontier. The vague dis-
comfort aroused in one by these epigram-
matic productions is due probably to a con-
fusion of kinds. Ambiguity of style keeps
one ina perpetual state of tension and
self-defence ; we ought not to be left in
doubt whether the speaker is jesting or se-
rious, mocking or tender. Moreover, banter
is not humour, and never will be. I think,
indeed, that the professional wit finds a diffi-
culty in being genuinely comic, for want of

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 319

depth and disinterested feeling. To laugh
at things and people is not really a joy ; it
is at best but a cold pleasure. Buffoonery
is wholesomer, because it is a little more
kindly. The reason why continuous sar-
casm repels us is that it lacks two things
—humanity and seriousness. Sarcasm
implies pride, since it means putting one-
self above others,—and levity, because
conscience is allowed no voice in controlling
it. In short, we read satirical books, but
we only love and cling to the books in
which there is heart.

22d November 1880. — How is ill-nature
to be met and overcome? First, by humil-
ity: when a man knows his own weak-
nesses, why should he be angry with others
for pointing them out ? No doubt it is not
very amiable of them to do so, but still,
truth is on their side. Secondly, by reflec-
tion: after all we are what we are, and if
we have been thinking too much of our-
selves, it is only an opinion to be modified ;
the incivility of our neighbour leaves us
what we were before. Above all, by par-
don: there is only one way of not hating
those who do us wrong, and that is by do-
ing them good ; anger is best conquered by
kindness. Such a victory over feeling may

320 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

not indeed affect those who have wronged
us, but it is a valuable piece of self-disci-
pline. It is vulgar to be angry on one’s
own account; we ought only to be angry
for great causes. Besides, the poisoned
dart can only be extracted from the wound
by the balm of a silent and thoughtful
charity. Why do we let human malignity
embitter us ? why should ingratitude, jeal-
ousy —perfidy even —enrage us? Thereis
no end to recriminations, complaints, or
reprisals. The simplest plan is to blot
everything out. Anger, rancour, bitter-
ness, trouble the soul. Every man is a dis-
penser of justice ; but there is one wrong
that he is not bound to punish —that of
which he himself is the victim. Such a
wrong is to be healed, not avenged. Fire
purifies all.

‘Mon fme est comme un feu qui dévore et
parfume
Ce qu’on jette pour le ternir.’

27th December 1880. —In an article I
have just read, Biedermann reproaches
Strauss with being too negative, and with
having broken with Christianity. The
object to be pursued, according to him,
should be the freeing of religion from the

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 321

mythological element, and the substitution
of another point of view for the antiquated
dualism of orthodoxy,—this other point
of view to be the victory over the world,
produced by the sense of divine sonship.

It is true that another question arises:
has not a religion which has separated
itself from special miracle, from local
interventions of the supernatural, and
from mystery, lost its savour and its effi-
cacy? For the sake of satisfying a thinking
and instructed public, is it wise to sacri-
fice the influence of religion over the multi-
tude ? Answer. A pious fiction is still a
fiction. Truth has the highest claim. It is
for the world to accommodate itself to truth,
and not vice vers@. Copernicus upset the
astronomy of the Middle Ages, —so much
the worse for it! The Eternal Gospel rev-
olutionises modern churches— what mat-
ter! When symbols become transparent,
they have no further binding force. We
see in them a poem, an allegory, a meta-
phor ; but we believe in them no longer.

Yes, but still a certain esotericism is
inevitable, since critical, scientific, and phil-
osophical culture is only attainable by a
minority. The new faith must have its
symbols too. At present the effect it pro-

322 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

duces on pious souls is a more or less pro-
fane one ; it has a disrespectful, incredulous,
frivolous look, and it seems to free a man
from traditional dogma at the cost of seri-
ousness of conscience. How are sensitive-
ness of feeling, the sense of sin, the desire
for pardon, the thirst for holiness, to be
preserved among us, when the errors which
haye served them so long for support and
food have been eliminated ? Is not illusion
indispensable ? is it not the divine process
of education ?

Perhaps the best way is to draw a deep
distinction between opinion and belief, and
between belief and science. The mind
which discerns these different degrees may
allow itself imagination and faith, and still
remain within the lines of progress.

.

28th December 1880.— There are two
modes of classing the people we know: the
first is utilitarian —it starts from ourselves,
divides our friends from our enemies, and
distinguishes those who are antipathetic to
us, those who are indifferent, those who can
serve or harm us; the second is disinter-
ested —it classes men according to their
intrinsic value, their own qualities and de-
fects, apart from the feelings which they
have for us, or we for them.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 323

My tendency is to the second kind of
classification. I appreciate men less by
the special affection which they show to me
than by their personal excellence, and I
cannot confuse gratitude with esteem. It
is a happy thing for us when the two feel-
ings can be combined ; and nothing is more
painful than to owe gratitude where yet we
can feel neither respect nor confidence.

I am not very willing to believe in the
permanence of accidental states. The gen-
erosity of a miser, the good-nature of an
egotist, the gentleness of a passionate tem-
perament, the tenderness of a barren nature,
the piety of a dull heart, the humility of
an excitable self-love, interest me as phe-
nomena — nay, even touch me if I am the
object of them, but they inspire me with
very little confidence. I foresee the end of
them too clearly. Every exception tends to
disappear and to return to the rule. All
privilege is temporary, and besides, I am
less flattered than anxious when I find my-
self the object of a privilege.

A inan’s primitive character may be cov-
ered over by alluvial deposits of culture
and acquisition, — none the less is it sure
to come to the surface when years have
worn away all that is accessory and adven-

324 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

titious. I admit indeed the possibility of
great moral crises which sometimes revolu-
tionise the soul, but I dare not reckon on
them. It is a possibility —not a proba-
bility. In choosing one’s friends we must
choose those whose qualities are inborn, and
their virtues virtues of temperament. To
lay the foundations of friendship on bor-
rowed or added virtues is to build on an
artificial soil ; we run too many risks by it.
Exceptions are snares, and we ought
above all to distrust them when they charm
our vanity. To catch and fix a fickle heart
is a task which tempts all women; and a
man finds something intoxicating in the
tears of tenderness and joy which he alone
has had the power to draw from a proud
woman. But attractions of this kind are
deceptive. Affinity of nature founded on
worship of the same ideal, and perfect in
proportion to perfectness of soul, is the only
affinity which is worth anything. True love
is that which ennobles the personality, for-
tifies the heart, and sanctifies the existence.
And the being we love must not be myste-
rious and sphinx-like, but clear and limpid
as a diamond; so that admiration and
attachment may grow with knowledge.

. . . . . . =

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 325

Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles
love, only it is precisely love’s contrary. °
Instead of wishing for the welfare of the
object loved, it desires the dependence of
that object upon itself, and its own tri-
umph. Love is the forgetfulness of self;
jealousy is the most passionate form of
egotism, the glorification of a despotic,
exacting, and vain ego, which can neither
forget nor subordinate itself. The contrast
is pesteck

Kictority in women is Bomcttines the
accompaniment of a rare power of loving.
And when it is so their attachment is
strong as death ; their fidelity as resisting
as the diamond ; they are hungry for devo-
tion and athirst for sacrifice. Their love is
a piety, their tenderness a religion, and
they triple the energy of love by giving to
it the sanctity of duty.

To the spectator over fifty, the world cer-
tainly presents a good deal that is new, but
a great deal more which is only the old fur-
bished up — mere plagiarism and modifica-
tion, rather than amelioration. Almost
everything is a copy of a copy, a reflection
of a reflection, and the perfect being is as

326 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

rare now as he ever was. Let us not com-
plain of it; it is the reason why the world
lasts. Humanity improves but slowly ; that
is why history goes on.

Is not progress the goad of Siva? It
excites the torch to burn itself away; it
hastens the approach of death. Societies
which change rapidly only reach their final
catastrophe the sooner. Children who
are too precocious never reach maturity.
Progress should be the aroma of life, not
its substance.

Man is a passion which brings a will into
play, which works an intelligence, — and
thus the organs which seem to be in the
service of intelligence, are in reality only
the agents of passion. For all the com-
moner sorts of being, determinism is true:
inward liberty exists only as an exception
and as the result of self-conquest. And
even he who has tasted liberty is only free
intermittently and by moments. True
liberty, then, is not a continuous state: it
is not an indefeasible and invariable quality.
We are free only so far as we are not dupes
of ourselves, our pretexts, our instincts, our
temperament. We are freed by energy
and the critical spirit — that is to say, by

a,

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 327

detachment of soul, by self-government.
So that we are enslaved, but susceptible of
freedom ;- we are bound, but capable of
shaking off our bonds. The soul is caged,
but it has power to flutter within its cage.

Material results are but the tardy sign of
invisible activities. The bullet has started
long before the noise of the report has
reached us. The decisive events of the
world take vies 4 in the intellect.

see is the ise Mnendows ‘of all
realities in the sensible world, but the
transfiguration of sorrow after the manner
of Christ is a more beautiful solution of
the problem than the extirpation of sorrow,
after the method of Cakyamouni.

Life should be a giving birth to the soul,
the development of a higher mode of reality.
The animal must be humanised: flesh must
be made spirit ; physiological activity must
be transmuted into intellect and conscience,
into reason, justice, and generosity, as the
torch is transmuted into life and warmth.
The blind, greedy, selfish nature of man
must put on beauty and nobleness. ‘This
heavenly alchemy is what justifies our

328 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

presence on the earth: it is our mission
and our age

To 1 renounce happiness and think only
of duty, to put conscience in the place of
feeling ;— this voluntary martyrdom has
its nobility. The natural man in us flinches,
but the better self submits. To hope for
justice in the world is a sign of sickly
sensibility ; we must be able to do without
it. True manliness consists in such in-
dependence. Let the world think what it
will of us, it is its own affair. If it will
not give us the place which is lawfully ours
until after our death, or perhaps not at all,
it is but acting within its right. It is our
business to behave as though our country
were grateful, as though the world were
equitable, as though opinion were clear-
sighted, as though life were just, as though
men were good.

Death itself may become matter of con-
sent, and therefore a moral act. The animal
expires; man surrenders his soul to the
author of the soul. o

(With the year 1881, beginning with the
mouth of January, we enter upon the last

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 329

period of Amiel’s illness. Although he con-
tinued to attend to his professorial duties, and
never spoke of his forebodings, be felt himself
mortally ill, as we shall see by the following
extracts from the Journal. Amiel wrote up
to the end, doing little else, however, towards
the last than record the progress of his disease,
and the proofs of interest and kindliness which
he received. After weeks of suffering and
pain a state of extreme weakness gradually
gained upon him. His last lines are dated the
29th April; it was on the 11th of May that he
succumbed, without a struggle, to the compli-
cated disease from which he suffered. — S.]

5th January 1881. —I think I fear shame
more than death. Tacitus said: Omnia
serviliter pro dominatione. My tendency
is just the contrary. Even when it is
voluntary, dependence is a burden to me.
I should blush to find myself determined ‘+
by interest, submitting to constraint, or
becoming the slave of any will whatever.
To me vanity is slavery, self-love degrad-
ing, and utilitarianism meanness. I detest
the ambition which makes you the liege
man of something or some one —I desire
to be simply my own master.

If I had health I should be the freest
man I know. Although perhaps a little

330 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

hardness of heart would be desirable to
make me still more independent.

Let me exaggerate nothing. My liberty
is only negative. Nobody has any hold
over me, but many things have become
impossible to me, and if I were so foolish
as to wish for them, the limits of my liberty
would soon become apparent. Therefore I
take care not to wish for them, and not to
let my thoughts dwell on them. I only
desire what I am able for, and in this way
I run my head against no wall, I cease even
to be conscious of the boundaries which
enclose me. I take care to wish for rather
less than is in my power, that I may not
even be reminded of the obstacles in my
way. Renunciation is the safeguard of
dignity. Let us strip ourselves, if we
would not be stripped. He who has freely
given up his life may look death in the
face: what more can it take away from
him? Do away with desire and practise
charity — there you have the whole method
of Buddha, the whole secret of the great
Deliverance... . “

It is snowing, and my chest is teouble-
some. So that I depend on Nature and on
God. But I do not depend on human ca-
price ; this is the point to be insisted on.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 331

It is true that my chemist may make a
blunder and poison me, my banker may
reduce me to pauperism, just as an earthi-
quake may destroy my house without hope
of redress. Absolute independence, there-
fore, is a pure chimera. But I do possess
relative independence —that of the stoic
who withdraws into the fortress of his will,
and shuts the gates behind him.

‘Jurons, excepté Dieu, de n’avoir point de
maitre.

This oath of old Geneva remains my motto
still.

10th January 1881.—To let oneself be
troubled by the ill-will, the ingratitude, the
indifference, of others, is a weakness to
which I am very much inclined. It is pain-
ful to me to be misunderstood, ill judged.
I am wanting in manly hardihood, and the
heart in me is more vulnerable than it
ought to be. It seems to me, however,
that I have grown tougher in this respect
than I used to be. The malignity of the
world troubles me less than it did. Is it
the result of philosophy, or an effect of age,
or simply caused by the many proofs of re-
spect and attachment that I have received ?

332 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

These proofs were just what were want-
ing to inspire me with some self-respect.
Otherwise I,should have so easily believed
in my own nullity and in the insignificance
of all my efforts. Success is necessary
for the timid, praise is a moral stimulus,
and admiration a strengthening elixir. We
think we know ourselves, but as long as we
are ignorant of our comparative value, our
place in the social assessment, we do not
know ourselves well enough. If we are to
act with effect, we must count for some-
thing with our fellow-men; we must feel
ourselves possessed of some weight and
credit with them, so that our effort may be
rightly proportioned to the resistance which
has to be overcome. As long as we despise
opinion we are without a standard by which
to measure ourselves ; we do not know our
relative power. I have despised opinion
too much, while yet I have been too sensi-
tive to injustice. These two faults have
cost me dear. I longed for kindness, sym-
pathy, and equity, but my pride forbade
me to ask for them, or to employ any ad-
dress or calculation to obtain them. ... I
do not think I have been wrong altogether,
for all through I have been in harmony
with my best self, but my want of adapta-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 333

bility has worn me out, to no purpose.
Now, indeed, I am at peace within, but my
career is over, my strength is running out,
and my life is near its end.

‘Tl n’est plus temps pour rien excepté pour
mourir.’ :

This is why I can look at it all historically.

23d January 1881.— A tolerable night,
but this morning the cough has been
frightful. — Beautiful weather, the win-
dows ablaze with sunshine. With my feet
on the fender I have just finished the
newspaper.

At this moment I feel well, and it seems
strange to me that my doom should be so
near. Life has no sense of kinship with
death. This is why, no doubt, a sort of
mechanical instinctive hope is for ever
springing up afresh in us, troubling our
reason, and casting doubt on the verdict of
science. All life is tenacious and persist-
ent. It is like the parrot in the fable, who,
at the very moment when its neck is being
wrung, still repeats with its last breath —

‘Cela, cela, ne sera rien.’

The intellect puts the matter at its worst,
but the animal protests. It will not be-

334 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

lieve in the evil till it comes. Ought one to
regret it? Probably not. It is Nature’s
will that life should defend itself against
death ; hope is only the love of life; it is
an organic impulse which religion has taken
under its protection. Who knows? God
may save us, may workamiracle. Besides,
are we ever sure that there is no remedy ?
Uncertainty is the refuge of hope. We
reckon the doubtful among the chances in
our favour. Mortal frailty clings to every
support. How be angry with it for so
doing? Even with all possible aids it
hardly ever escapes desolation and distress.
The supreme solution is, and always will
be, to see in necessity the fatherly will of
God, and so to submit ourselves and bear
our cross bravely, as an offering to the
Arbiter of human destiny. The soldier
does not dispute the order given him: he
obeys and dies without murmuring. If he
waited to understand the use of his sacri-
fice, where would his submission be ?

It occurred to me this morning how little
we know of each other’s physical troubles ;
even those nearest and dearest to us know
nothing of our conversations with the King
of Terrors. ‘There are thoughts which
brook no confidant ; there are griefs which

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 335

cannot be shared. Consideration for others
even bids us conceal them. We dream
alone, we suffer alone, we die alone, we in~
habit the last resting-place alone. But
there is nothing to prevent us from opening
our solitude to God. And so what was an
austere monologue becomes dialogue, reluc-
tance becomes docility, renunciation passes
into peace, and the sense of painful defeat
is lost in the sense of recovered liberty.

‘ Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science
Qui nous met en repos.’

None of us can escape the play of contrary
impulse ; but as soon as the soul has once
recognised the order of things, and sub-
mitted itself thereto, then all is well.

‘Comme un sage mourant puissions nous dire
en paix :
J’ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me
trompais:
Tout est bien, mon Dieu m’enveloppe.’

28th January 1881.—A terrible night.
For three or four hours I struggled against
suffocation and looked death in the face.
. . . Itis clear that what awaits me is suffo-
cation — asphyxia. I shall die by choking.
I should not have chosen such a death ;

336 AMIEL’S JOURNAL:

but when there is no option, one must sim-
ply resign oneself, and at once. ... Spi-
noza expired in the presence of the doctor
whom he had sent for. I must familiarise
myself with the idea of dying unexpectedly,
some fine night, strangled by laryngitis.
The last sigh of a patriarch surrounded by
his kneeling family is more beautiful: my
fate indeed lacks beauty, grandeur, poe-
try ; but stoicism consists in renunciation.
Abstine et sustine.

I must remember besides that I have
faithful friends ; it is better not to torment
them. The last journey is only made more
painful by scenes and lamentations: one
word is worth all others— ‘Thy will, not
mine, be done!’ Leibnitz was accompanied
to the grave by his servant only. The lone-
liness of the deathbed and the tomb is not
an evil. The great mystery cannot be
shared. The dialogue between the soul and
the King of Terrors needs no witnesses. It
is the living who cling to the thought of last
greetings. And, after all, no one knows
exactly what is reserved for him. What
will be will be. We have but to say,
*‘ Amen.’ Pat

4th February 1881. — It is a strange sen-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 337

sation that of laying oneself down to rest
with the thought that perhaps one will
never see the morrow. Yesterday I felt it
strongly, and yet here I am. Hununility is
made easy by the sense of excessive frailty,
but it cuts away all ambition.

‘ Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensées.’

A long piece of work seems absurd — one
lives but from day to day.

When a man can no longer look forward
in imagination to five years, a year, a
month, of free activity, when he is re-
duced to counting the hours, and to seeing
in the coming night the threat of an un-
known fate, —it is plain that he must give
up art, science, and politics, and that he
must be content to hold converse with him-
self, the one possibility which is his till the
end. Inward soliloquy is the only resource
of the condemned man whose execution is
delayed. He withdraws upon the fastnesses
of conscience. His spiritual force no longer
radiates outwardly ; it is consumed in self-
study. Action is cut off— only contempla-
tion remains. He still writes to those who
have claims upon him, but he bids farewell
to the public, and retreats into himself.
Like the hare, he comes back to die in his

.

338 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

form, and this form is his consciousness,
his intellect, —the journal, too, which has
been the companion of his inner life. As
long as he can hold a pen, as long as he
has a moment of solitude, this echo of him-
self still claims his meditation, still repre-
sents to him his converse with his God,

In all this, however, there is nothing akin
to self-examination: it is not an act of con-
trition, ora cry for help. It is simply an
Amen of submission —‘ My child, give me
thy heart !’

Renunciation and acquiescence are less
difficult to me than to others, for I desire
nothing. I could only wish not to suffer,
but Jesus on Gethsemane allowed himself
to make the same prayer; let us add to it
the words that he did: ‘ Nevertheless, not
my will, but thine, be done,’ — and wait.

. . . For many years past the immanent
God has been more real to me than the
transcendent God, and the religion of Ja-
cob has been more alien to me than that of

. Kant, or even Spinoza. The whole Semitic
dramaturgy has come to seem to me a work
of the imagination. The apostolic docu-
ments haye changed in value and mean-
ing to my eyes. Belief and truth have
become distinct to me with a growing dis-

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 339

tinctness. Religious psychology has_be-
come a simple phenomenon, and has lost its
fixed and absolute value. The apologetics
of Pascal, of Leibnitz, of Secrétan, are to
me no more convincing than those of the
middle ages, for they presuppose what is
really in question, —a revealed doctrine,
a definite and unchangeable Christianity.
It seems to me that what remains to me
from all my studies is a new phenome-
nology of mind, an intuition of universal
metamorphosis. All particular convictions,
all definite principles, all clear-cut formulas
and fixed ideas, are but prejudices, useful
in practice, but still narrownesses of the
mind. The absolute in detail is absurd
and contradictory. All political, religious,
esthetic, or literary parties are protuber-
ances, misgrowths of thought. Every
special belief represents a stiffening and
thickening of thought; a stiffening, how-
ever, which is necessary in its time and place.
Our monad, in its thinking capacity, over-
leaps the boundaries of time and space and
of its own historical surroundings ; but in
its individual capacity, and for purposes of
action, it adapts itself to current illusions,
and puts before itself a definite end. It is
lawful to be man, but it is needful also to

340 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

be aman, to be an individual. Our 7éle is
thus a double one. Only, the philosopher
is specially authorised to develop the first
role, which the vast majority of humankind
neglects.

7th February 1881. — Beautiful sunshine
to-day. But I have scarcely spring enough
left in me to notice it. Admiration, joy,
presuppose a little relief from pain. Whereas
my neck is tired with the weight of my
head, and my heart is wearied with the
weight of life;— this is not the xsthetic
state.

I have been thinking over different things
which I might have written. But generally
speaking we let what is most original and
best in us be wasted. We reserve ourselves
for a future which never comes. Omnis
moriar.

14th February 1881. — Supposing that my
weeks are numbered, what duties still re-
main to me to fulfil, that I may leave all in
order? I must give every one-his due;
justice, prudence, kindness must be satis-
fied ; the last memories must be sweet ones.
Try to forget nothing useful, nor anybody
who has a claim upon thee !

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 341

15th February 1881.—I have, very re-
luctantly, given up my lecture at the Uni-
versity, and sent for my doctor. On my
chimney-piece are the flowers which ——
has sent me. Letters from London, Paris,
Lausanne, Neuchatel. ... They seem to
me like wreaths thrown into a grave.

Mentally I say farewell to all the distant |

friends whom I shall never see again.

18th February 1881.— Misty weather. A
fairly good night. Still, the emaciation goes
on. That is to say, the vulture allows me
some respite, but he still hovers over his
prey. The possibility of resuming my offi-
cial work seems like a dream to me.

Although just now the sense of ghostly
remoteness from life which I so often have
is absent, I feel myself a prisoner for good,
a hopeless invalid. This vague intermediate
state, which is neither death nor life, has
its sweetness, because if it implies renunci-
ation, still it allows of thought. It is a
reverie without pain, peaceful and medi-
tative. Surrounded with affection and
with books, I float down the stream of
time, as once I glided over the Dutch
canals, smoothly and noiselessly. It is as
though I were once more on board the

342 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Treckschute. Scarcely can one hear even
the soft ripple of the water furrowed by the
barge, or the hoof of the towing horse
trotting along the sandy path. A journey
under these conditions has something fan-
tastic in it. One is not sure whether one
still exists, still belongs to earth. It is like
the manes, the shadows, flitting through the
twilight of the inania. regna. Existence
has become fluid. From the standpoint of
complete personal renunciation I watch the
passage of my impressions, my dreams,
thoughts, and memories... . It isa mood
of fixed contemplation akin to that which
we attribute to the Seraphim. It takes no
interest in the individual self, but only in
the specimen monad, the sample of the
general history of mind. Everything is in
everything, and the consciousness examines
what it has before it. Nothing is either
great or small. The mind adopts all modes,
and everything is acceptable to it. In this
state its relations with the body, with the
outer world, and with other individuals,
fade out of sight. Selbst-bewusstsein be-
comes once more impersonal Bewusstsein,
and before personality can be reacquired,
pain, duty, and will must be brought into
action.

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 343

Are these oscillations between the per-
sonal and the impersonal, between pan-
theism and theism, between Spinoza and
Leibnitz, to be regretted ? No, for it is the
one state which makes us conscious of the
other. And as man is capable of ranging
the two domains, why should he mutilate
himself ?

22d February 1881. — The march of mind
finds its typical expression in astronomy —
no pause, but no hurry; orbits, cycles,
energy, but at the same time harmony ;
movement and yet order; everything has
its own weight and its relative weight, re-
ceives and gives forth light. Cannot this
cosmic and divine energy become ours?
Is the war of all against all, the preying of
man upon man, a higher type of balanced
action? I shrink from believing it. Some
theorists imagine that the phase of selfish
brutality is the last phase of all. They
must be wrong. Justice will prevail, and
justice is not selfishness. Independence of
intellect, combined with goodness of heart,
will be the agents of a result, which will be
vhe compromise required.

1st March 1881. — I have just been glanc-

344 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

ing over the affairs of the world in the
newspaper. Whata Babel itis! But itis
very pleasant to be able to make the tour of
the planet and review the human race in an
hour. It gives one asense of ubiquity. A
newspaper in the twentieth century will be
composed of eight or ten daily bulletins —
political, religious, scientific, literary, artis-
tic, commercial, meteorological, military,
economical, social, legal, and financial;
and will be divided into two parts only —
Urbs and Orbis. The need of totalising,
of simplifying, will bring about the general
use of such graphic methods as permit of
series and comparisons. We shall end by
feeling the pulse of the race and the globe
as easily as that of a sick man, and we shall
count the palpitations of the universal life,
just as we shall hear the grass growing, or
the sun-spots clashing, and catch the first
stirrings of volcanic disturbances. Activity
will become consciousness ; the earth will
see herself. Then will be the time for her
to blush for her disorders, her hideousness,
her misery, her crime — and to throw her-
self at last with energy and perseverance
into the pursuit of justice. When human-
ity has cut its wisdom-teeth, then perhaps
it will have the grace to reform itself, and

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 345

the will to attempt a systematic reduction
of the share of the evilin the world. The
Weltgeist will pass from the state of in-
stinct to the moral state. War, hatred,
selfishness, fraud, the right of the stronger,
will be held to be old-world barbarisms,
mere diseases of growth. The pretences of
modern civilisation will be replaced by real .
virtues. Men will be brothers, peoples will
be friends, races will sympathise one with
another, and mankind will draw from love
a principle of emulation, of invention, and
of zeal, as powerful as any furnished by
the vulgar stimulant of interest. This mil-
lennium — will it ever be? It is at least
an act of piety to believe in it.

14th March 1881.—I have finished Méri-
mée’s letters to Panizzi. Mérimée died
of the disease which torments me —‘ Je
tousse, et j’étouffe.’ Bronchitis and asthma,
whence defective assimilation, and finally
exhaustion. He, too, tried arsenic, winter-
ing at Cannes, compressed air. All was
useless. Suffocation and inanition car-
ried off the author of Colomba. Hic tua
res agitur. The gray, heavy sky is of the
same colour as my thoughts. And yet the
irrevocable has its own sweetness and

346 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

serenity. The fluctuations of illusion, the
uncertainties of desire, the leaps and bounds
of hope, give place to tranquil resignation.
One feels as though one were already be-
yond the grave. It is this very week, too,
I remember, that my corner of ground in
the Oasis is to be bought. Everything
draws towards the end. Festinat ad
eventum.

15th March 1881.— The Journal is full
of details of the horrible affair at Peters-
burg. How clear it is that such catastro-
phes as this, in which the innocent suffer,
are the product of a long accumulation of
iniquities. Historical justice is, generally
speaking, tardy — so tardy that it becomes
unjust. The Providential theory is really
based on human solidarity. Louis XVI.
pays for Louis XV.,— Alexander II. for
Nicholas. We expiate the sins of our
fathers, and our grandchildren will be pun-
ished for ours. A double injustice! cries
the individual. And he is right if the indi-
vidualist principle is true. But is it true ?
That is the point. It seems as though the
individual part of each man’s destiny were
but one section of that destiny. Morally
we are responsible for what we ourselves

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 347

have willed, but socially, our happiness
and unhappiness depend on causes outside
our will. Religion answers —‘ Mystery,
obscurity, submission, faith. Do your
duty ; leave the rest to God !’

16th March 1881.—A wretched night.
A melancholy morning.... The two
stand-bys of the doctor, digitalis and bro-
mide, seem to have lost their power over
me. Wearily and painfully I watch the
tedious progress of my own decay. What
efforts to keep oneself from dying! I am
worn out with the struggle.

Useless and incessant struggle is a humil-
iation to one’s manhood. The lion finds
_the gnat the most intolerable of his foes.
The natural man feels the same. But the
spiritual man must learn the lesson of gen-
tleness and long-suffering. The inevitable
is the will of God. We might have pre-
ferred something else, but it is our business
to accept the lot assigned us.... One
thing only is necessary —

‘Garde en mon cceur la foi dans ta volonté
sainte,

Et de moi fais, 6 Dieu, tout ce que tu you-
dras.’

348 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

Later.—One of my students has just
brought me a sympathetic message from
my class. My sister sends me a pot of aza-
leas, rich in flowers and buds ; —— sends
roses and violets: every one spoils me,
which proves that I am ill.

19th March 1881. — Distaste — discourage-
ment. My heart is growing cold. And yet
what affectionate care, what tenderness,
surrounds me! ... But without health,
what can one do with all the rest? What
is the good of it alltome? What was the
good of Job’s trials? They ripened his
patience ; they exercised his submission.

Come, let me forget myself, let me shake
off this melancholy, this weariness. Let
me think, not of all that is lost, but of all
that I might still lose. I will reckon up my
privileges ; I will try to be worthy of my
blessings.

21st March 1881. — This invalid life is
too Epicurean. For five or six weeks now
I have done nothing else but wait, nurse
myself, and amuse myself, and how weary
one gets of it! What I wantis work. It
is work which gives flavour to life. Mere
existence without object and without effort

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 349

is a poor thing. Idleness leads to languor,
and languor to disgust. Besides, here is
the spring again, the season of vague de-
sires, of dull discomforts, of dim aspira-
tions, of sighs without a cause. We dream
wide-awake. We search darkly for we
know not what; invoking the while some-
thing which has no name, unless it be hap-
piness or death.

28th March 1881. —I cannot work ; I find
it difficult to exist. One may be glad to let
one’s friends spoil one for a few months ; it
is an experience which is good for us all;
but afterwards? How much better to make
room for the living, the active, the produc-
tive.

‘Tircis, voici le temps de prendre sa retraite.’

Is it that I care so much to go on living? I
think not. It is health that I long for—
freedom from suffering. And this desire
being vain, I can find no savour in any-
thing else.—Satiety. Lassitude. Renun-
ciation. Abdication. ‘In your patience
possess ye your souls.’

10th April 1881 (Sunday). —Visit to —.
She read over to me letters of 1844 to 1845

350 AMIEL’S JOURNAL.

—letters of mine. So much promise to
end in so meagre aresult! What creatures
we are! I shall end like the Rhine, lost
among the sands, and the hour is close by
when my thread of water will have disap-
peared.

Afterwards I had a little walk in the sun-
set. There was an effect of scattered rays
and stormy clouds; a green haze envelops
all the trees —

‘Et tout renait, et déja l’aubépine
A vu l’abeille accourir & ses fleurs,’

— but to me it all seems strange already.

Later. — What dupes we are of our own
desires! ... Destiny has two ways of crush-
ing us — by refusing our wishes and by ful-
filling them. But he who only wills what
God wills escapes both catastrophes. ‘ All
things work together for his good.’

14th April 1881.— Frightful night; the
fourteenth running, in which I have been
consumed by sleeplessness. .. .

15th April 1881.—To-morrow is Good
Friday, the festival of pain. I know what
it is to spend days of anguish and nights of

AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 351

agony. Let me bear my cross humbly. ...
I have no more future. My duty is to sat-
isfy the claims of the present, and to leave
everything in order. Let me try to end
well, seeing that to undertake and even to
continue, are closed to me.

19th April 1881.—A terrible sense of
oppression. My flesh and my heart fail
me.

‘Que vivre est difficile, 6 mon cceur fatigué !’

END OF VOL. Il,

APPENDIX.

Tue following short but valuable criticism
of Amiel’s philosophical thought, in its more
technical aspects, has been sent me, at my
request, by a friend well qualified to speak in
the matter. — M. A. W.

So far as can be judged from the published
fragments of the Diary, Amiel was not an
adherent of any philosophical system. Ideas,
however, which, for brevity’s sake, may be
called Hegelian, but which may have been
derived from the most various sources, were
constantly at his command as means of criti-
cism and as aids to imagination; and where
these ideas touched him nearly, as in all mat-
ters affecting the religious life, he made them
his own and founded his life upon them. One
remark at least on sesthetics—an analysis of
the pleasure produced by so-called imitative
art —a distinction between character and dis-
position, directed against Schopenhauer’s view
that character is invariable; a doctrine of
moral freedom in the same key as that dis-
tinction, treating moral freedom as not innate,
but acquired; and above all, an ardent con-

352

APPENDIX. 353

viction of the essential truth of the true*
Christian religion, and a conception of ‘ imma-
nence’ akin, as Amiel expressly says, to the
religion of Spinoza ;—all these ideas and be-
beliefs reveal an esthetic, a psychology of
morals, and a theology drawn in essentials
from the spiritual philosophy of which we
may take Hegel as the representative. ‘Hegel
libére tout autrement la pensée,’ he says in
criticising Havet’s Origines du Christianisme;
and in the first consciousness of failing health
(in 1876) he recurred with pleasure to a
Hegelian conception that seemed to invest the
intellectual life with peculiar dignity and
interest.

But Amiel was always repelled by what he
considered the Spinozistic and Hegelian ten- °
dency to replace religion by philosophy. The
amor intellectualis can never, he says, take
the place of ‘amour moral.’ He uses Hege-
lian and Intellectualist as equivalent terms.
Goethe, again, is ‘Spinozist to the core,’ or
‘un Gree du bon temps.’ Even Schleier-
macher, of whose Monologues he speaks with
enthusiastic admiration, ‘ hardly mentions the
existence of evil.’ The capital fact is not
metaphysical, but moral; not even Imma-
nence, but Sin. The neo-Hegelians appeal to
the intelligence, not to the will, and so ‘Ruge
et Feuerbach ne peuvent sauver l’humanité.’

* Cf. ‘Quand le christianisme sera mort, la religion
de Jésus pourra survivre,’

354 APPENDIX.

Amiel had a strong sympathy with mysti-
cism. He quotes from European mystics, and
recurs frequently to Oriental ideas, especially
to the notions of Nirvana and of Maya.* It
was not only his profound religious instinct,
and his curious psychological experiences, but
also an innate distrust of apparent reality,
that was active in this sympathy. Amiel was
well aware of his tendency, ‘ Mon instinct est
d’accord avec le pessimisme de Bouddha et de
Schopenhauer.’ His references to Maya are
in the tone of Schopenhauer, and though he
finds the weak point in Schopenhauer’s psy-
chology, and rejects the fundamental axiom
of his pessimism, yet Schopenhauer’s influence
can be traced in much of Amiel’s meditation.

Perhaps he was the more open to this influ-
ence because of a certain affinity with that
French intellect which he so subtly criticises.
Extremes meet in philosophy, and abstract
logical antitheses are apt to favour mysticism.
Sometimes—for his thought varied contin-
ually — Amiel treats the absolute as ‘the zero
of all determination,’ and so as excluding the
relative; the infinite as the unknown, or as

* Cf. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Jdea,
Eng. Tr., vol. i. p. 9, ‘The ancient wisdom of the
Indian philosopher declares, “It is Maya, the veil
of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals and
makes them behold a world of which they cannot
say either that it is or that it is not.”’ This is,
Schopenhauer continues, ‘the world as idea subject
to the principle of sufficient reason.’

APPENDIX. 355

the immensity of space or time; and the ideal
as nowhere to be found in reality. In as far
as these conceptions ruled his mood, Amiel’s
pessimistic instinct had an intellectual root.
But comments of this nature, which some
passages of the Diary might seem to invite,
would be found nugatory when confronted
with others. Among these others is a saying
with which I end this note—‘ Le devoir a la
vertu de nous faire sentir la réalité du monde
positif, tout en nous en détachant.’

|

\

NOTES.

[A few of the following notes are translated from
the French edition of the Journal.]

1. P. 10.—Il Penseroso, poésies-maximes
par H. F. Amiel: Genéve, 1858. This little
book, which contains 133 maxims, several of
which are quoted in the Journal Intime, is
prefaced by a motto translated from Shelley
—‘Ce n’est pas la science qui nous manque, &
nous modernes; nous l’ayons surabondam-
ment.... Mais ce que nous avons absorbé
nous absorbe. ... Ce qui nous manque c’est
la poésie de la vie.’

2. P. 12.—Charles Secrétan, a Lausanne
professor, the friend of Vinet, born 1819. He
published Lecons sur la Philosophie de Leib-
nitz, Philosophie de la Liberté, La Raison et
le Christianisme, ete.

3. P. 31.— Etienne Vacherot, a French
philosophical writer, who owed his first sue-
cesses in life to the friendship of Cousin, and
was later brought very much into notice by
his controversy with the Abbé Gratry, by the
prosecution brought against him in conse-

356

NOTES. 357

quence of his book, La Démocratie (1859),
and by his rejection at the hands of the Acad-
emy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1865,
for the same kind of reasons which had
brought about the exclusion of Littré in the
preceding year. In 1868, however, he became
a member of the Institute in succession to
Cousin. A Liberal of the old school, he has
separated himself from the Republicans since
the war, and has made himself felt as a severe
critic of Republican blunders in the Revue
des deux Mondes. La Religion, which dis-
cusses the psychological origins of the relig-
ious sense, was published in 1868.

4. P. 34.—At this period the controversy
between the orthodox party and ‘Liberal
Christianity ’ was at its height, both in Geneva
and throughout Switzerland.

5. P. 37.— Gustave-Adolphe Hirn, a French
physicist, born near Colmar, 1815, became a
Corresponding Member of the Academy of
Sciences in 1867. The book of his to which
Amiel refers is no doubt Conséquences phi-
losophiques et métaphysiques de la thermody-
namique, Analyse élémentaire de l’univers
(1869).

6. P. 37.—The name of M. Albert Réville,
the French Protestant theologian, is more or
less familiar in England, especially since his
delivery of the Hibbert Lectures in 1884.

358 NOTES.

Athanase Coquerel, born 1820, died 1876, the
well-known champion of Liberal ideas in the
French Protestant Church, was suspended
from his pastoral functions by the Consistory
of Paris, on account of his review of M.
Renan’s Vie de Jésus in 1864. Ferdinand-
Edouard Buisson, a Liberal Protestant, origi-
nally a professor at Lausanne, was raised to
the important functions of Director of Primary
Instruction by M. Ferry in 1879. He was
denounced by Bishop Dupanloup, in the Na-
tional Assembly of 1871, as the author of
certain Liberal pamphlets on the dangers con-
nected with Scripture-teaching in schools,
and, for the time, lost his employment under
the Ministry of Education.

7. P. 56.— This is one of the passages
which rouses M. Renan’s wonder. ‘ Voila la
grande différence,’ he writes, ‘ entre 1’éduca-
tion catholique et l'éducation protestante.
Ceux qui comme moi ont recu une éducation
catholique en ont gardé de profonds vestiges.
Mais ces vestiges ne sont pas des dogmes, ce
sont des réves. Une fois ce grand rideau de
drap d’or, bariolé de soie, d’indienne et de
calicot, par lequel le catholicisme nous masque
la vue du monde, une fois, dis-je ce rideau
déchiré, on voit l’univers en sa splendeur
infinie, la nature en sa haute et pleine ma-
jesté. Le protestant le plus libre garde
souvent quelque chose de triste, un fond

NOTES. 359

d’austérité intellectuelle analogue au pessi-
misme slave.’ — (Journal des Débats, Septem-
ber 30, 1884.)

One is reminded of Mr. Morley’s criticism
of Emerson. Emerson, he points out, has
almost nothing to say of death, and ‘little to
say of that horrid burden and inpediment on
the soul which the churches call sin, and
which, by whatever name we call it, is a very
real catastrophe in the moral nature of man;
—the courses of nature, and the prodigious
injustices of man in society affect him with

neither horror nor awe. He will see no mon-

ster if he can help it.’

Here, then, we have the eternal difference
between the two orders of temperament — the
men whose overflowing energy forbids them
to realise the ever-recurring defeat of the
human spirit at the hands of circumstance,
like Renan and Emerson, and the men for
whom ‘horror and awe’ are interwoven with
experience, like Amiel.

8. P. 102.—Mably, the Abbé Mably, 1709-
85, one of the precursors of the Revolution,
the professor of a cultivated and classical
communism based on a study of antiquity,
which Babeuf, and others like him, in the
following generation, translated into practical
experiment. ‘Caius Gracchus’ Babeuf, born
1764, and guillotined in 1797 for a conspiracy
against the Directory, is sometimes called the

360 NOTES.

first French Socialist. Perhaps Socialist doc-
trines, properly so called, may be said to make
their first entry into the region of popular
debate and practical agitation with his Mani-
Feste des Egaux, issued April 1796.

9. P. 109.—‘‘‘Persifflez les pharisaismes,
mais parlez droit aux honnétes gens’”’ me dit
Amiel, avec une certaine aigreur. Mon Dieu,
que les honnétes gens sont souvent exposés a
étre des pharisiens sans le savoir!’ — (M.
Renan’s article, already quoted.)

10. P. 111.— Polyeucte, Act V. Scene v.

‘Mon époux en mourant m’a laissé ses lumiéres;
Son sang dont tes bourreaux viennent de me couvrir
M’a dessillé les yeux et me les vient d’ouvrir
Je vois, je sais, je crois——’

11. P. 121.—A Synod of the Reformed
Churches of France was then occupied in de-
termining the constituent conditions: of Prot-
estant belief.

12. P.129.— Louise Siefert, a modern French
poetess, died 1879. In addition to Les Stoiques,
she published L’ Année Républicaine, Paris,
1869, and other works.

13. P. 134.—‘ We all believe in duty,’ says
M. Renan, ‘and in the triumph of righteous-
ness;’ but it is possible notwithstanding, ‘ que
tout le contraire soit vrai—et que le monde
ne soit qu’une amusante féerie dont aucun

NOTES. 361

dieu ne se soucie. I] faut donc nous arranger
de maniére & ceque, dans le cas ot le seconde
hypothése serait la vraie, nous n’ayons pas
été trop dupés.’

This strain of remark, which is developed
at considerable length, is meant as a criticism
of Amiel’s want of sensitiveness to the irony
of things. But in reality, as the passage in
the text shows, M. Renan is only expressing a
feeling with which Amiel was just as familiar
as his critic. Only he is delivered from his
last doubt of all by his habitual seriousness ;
by that sense of ‘horror and awe’ which M.
Renan puts away from him. Conscience saves
him ‘from the sorceries of Maia.’

14. P. 160.— Ernest Havet, born 1813, a dis-
tinguished French scholar and professor. He
became Professor of Latin Oratory at. the
Collége de France in 1855, and a Member of
the Institute in January 1880. His admirable
edition of the Pensées de Pascal is well known.
Le Christianisme et ses Origines, an impor-
tant book, in four volumes, was developed
from a series of articles in the Revue des deux
Mondes, and the Revue Contemporaine.

15. P. 171.— Amiel had just received at the
hands of his doctor the medical verdict, which
was his arrét de mort.

16. P.191.—Compare this paragraph from
the Pensées of a new writer, M. Joseph Roux,

362 NOTES.

a country curé, living in a remote part of the
Bas Limousin, whose thoughts have been
edited and published this year by M. Paul
Mariéton (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre) —

‘Le verbe ne souffre et ne connait que la volonté
qui le dompte, et n’emporte loin sans péril que l’in-
telligence qui lui ménage avec empire ]’éperon et le
frein.’

17. P. 207. — Ximénés Doudan, born in 1800,
died 1872, the brilliant friend and tutor of the
De Broglie family, whose conversation was so
much sought after in life, and whose letters
have been so eagerly read in France since his
death. Compare M. Scherer’s two articles on
Doudan’s Lettres and Pensées in his last pub-
lished volume of essays.

18. P. 235.— Compare La Bruyére —

* Entre toutes les differentes expressions qui peu-
vent rendre une seule de nos pensées il n’y en a
qu’une qui soit la bonne; on ne la rencontre pas
toujours en parlant ou en écrivant: il est vray néan-
moins qu’elle existe, que tout ce qui ne lest point
est foible, et ne satisfait point un homme d’esprit
qui veut se faire entendre.’

19. P. 243. — Amiel’s expression is Les Par-
nassiens, an old name revived, which nowa-
days describes the younger school of French
poetry represented by such names as Théo-
phile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de
Bauville, and Baudelaire. The, modern use

NOTES. 363

of the word dates from the publication of Le
Parnasse Contemporain (Lemerre, 1866).

20. P. 284.— Victor de Laprade, born 1812,
first a disciple and imitator of Edgar Quinet,
then the friend of Lamartine, Lamennais,
George Sand, Victor Hugo; admitted to the
Academy in 1857 in succession to Alfred de
Musset. He wrote Parfums de Madeleine,
1839; Odes et Poemes, 1843; Poemes Evan-
géliques, 1852; Idylles Héroiques, 1858, etc.
etc.

21. P. 293.— Madame Necker de Saussure
was the daughter of the famous geologist, De
Saussure; she married a nephew of Jacques
Necker, and was therefore cousin by marriage
of Madame de Staél. She is often supposed
to be the original of Madame de Cerlébe in
Delphine, and the Notice sur le Caractere et
les Ecrits de Mdme. de Staél, prefixed to the
authoritative edition of Madame de Staél’s
collected works, is by her. Philanthropy and
education were her two main interests, but
she had also a very large amount of general
literary cultivation, as was proved by her
translation of Schlegel’s Lectures on Dra-
matic Literature.

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P ‘
4 *
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Bry Ps ae Sa

INDEX.

AxoutT’s satire and irony, i. 298.
Absolute, Amiel’s craving for the, i. 96.
conception of the, ii. 169, 203.
Absolutism, ii. 70.
Accident, philosophy of, i. 119.
and Providence, i. 306.
Ackermann, poems of Madame, ii. 167.
Acorn and oak, ii. 315.
Action, Amiel’s cross, i. 182.
= concrete thought, i. 8.
how to recover courage for, i. 69.
requisites for, ii. 290.
Activity of the Western Nations, unholy, ii. 279.
Adoration and consolation essential in religion, i. 178.
Advice, giving, ii. 117.
fEschylus’s Prometheus and Eumenides, ii. 136.
Affected poets, ii. 244.
Affirmation and examination, ii. 123.
Age, loss of respect for, i. 230.
the servitude of, ii. 24.
Alcibiades, ii. 209.
Algebra z. life, ii. 95.
All or nothing, ii. 169.
Alps, the, i. 94,'287; ii. 75.
Ambition, Amiel’s horror of, i. 189; ii. 200,
moral, ii. 58.
Americans, the, ii. 279.

365

366 INDEX.

Amusement and instruction, ii. 269.
Analysis, extreme, i. 185.

kills spontaneity, ii. 257.

of self, Amiel’s, i. 279-

woman’s dislike of, i. 304.
Analytic minds, i. 292.
Anger, conquest of, ii. 319.
Animality, the laws of, ii. 214.
Animals, treatment of, i. 274.
Annihilation of Buddha, ii. 29.
Anonymous souls, ii. 37-
Ant v. swallow, i. 142.
A priori speculations, ii. 123.
Arcadia, an expedition into, ii. 182.
Aristotle, ii. 203.
Art, decadence of, ii. 4.

grand and simple, ii. 245.

and imagination, ii, 253.

reveals Nature, i. 186.
Ascension Day, ii. 270.
Atala and René, Chateaubriand’s, i. 146, 149.
Atheism, effects of, ii. 212.
Atomism, philosophy of, i. 230.
Attila, ii. 287.
Augustine and Lucian contrasted, ii. 217.
Authority z. liberty, ii. 37.
Autumn, melancholy of, ii. 176.

of life, ii. x2,

twofold, i. 223.
Azote, woman the social, ii. 135.

BaBBLE, ignorant, ii. 240.
Bach’s prelude, i. 88.

Bacon on religion, i i, 253.
Bahnsen’s pessimism, ii. 115.
Balzac, ii. 94.

Banniére Bleue, la, ii. 285.

INDEX. 367

Banter not humour, ii. 318.
Barbarism, possible triumph of, i. 232,
Basle, ii. 81.
Bayle and Saint Simon, ii. 48.
Beauty, female, i. 301.
v. goodness, ii. 217.
and pathos, i. 152, 153.
and ugliness, ii. 113.
universal in Paradise, i. 233.
Beauty = the spiritualisation of matter, i. 233.
Beethoven and Mozart contrasted, i. 88, 89.
Being, consciousness of, ii. 308.
and non-being, ii. 274.
Beranger, ii. 51.
Berkeley, i. 46.
Berlioz, Romeo and ¥ultet, ii, 228.
Bewusstsetn, ti. 342.
Biedermann on Strauss, ii. 320.
Biran’s Journal, i. 138-140.
Birds in bad weather, i. 278.
Bismarck, i. 306,
Blasés of the world, ii. 298.
Boileau and Fontaine contrasted, ii. 231.
Book, function of the, ii. 235.
Bossuet on charity, ii. 265.
Bourse, movements of the (the beat of the common
heart), i. 266.
Brahma, ii. 83.
his dream, i. 294.
Brahmanic aspirations, ii. 190.
Brahmanising souls, ii. 291.
Brain-decay, Amiel’s, ii. 218.
Buddha, ii. 78.
method of, ii. 330.
Buddism, ii. 29, 52, 167.
Buddhist tendency of Amiel, i. 273.
Buisson, ii. 37.

368 INDEX.

C-sarisM, the counterpoise of equality, i. 229, 230

Cartesian dualism, ii. 122.
Catholic superstition, ii. 141.
Catholicism, i. 93.
essence of, i. 214.
and revolution, ii. 67.
Causertes Athéniennes, Cherbuliez, i, 176.
Cellérier on St. James, i. 53.
Chance and Providence, i. 306.
Change not improvement, i. 251.
persistence in, ii. 89.
rules the world, i. 215.
Changeable character, Amiel’s, i. 281, 301.
Character, how to judge, ii. 317.
, temperament, and individuality, i ii. 47+
* and will, Amiel’s lack of, i. 180.
Charity, democratic character of, ii. 269.
Charm, ii. 113.
Chateaubriand, i. 146, 245.
and Rousseau, i. 148.
Cherbuliez, i. 312.
Mephistophelian novel, ii. 216.
on chivalry, etc., i. 175, 218.
Cherry trees and lilacs, i. 3.
Childhood, Amiel’s second, i. 219.
blessings of, i. 296.
first conversations of, i. 53.
revived impressions of, ii. 165.
Children, i. 152.
Chivalry, Cherbuliez on, i. 175.
Christendom and Ascension Day, ii. 270.
Christian nations, aspiration of, ii. 526,
preaching, confusions of, ii. 161.
Christianity a vast ocean, ii. 18,
different aspects of, ii. 19.
essence of, i. 82.

INDEX. 369

Christianity from a human point of view, ii. 14.
historical aspects of, ii. 120.
liberal, ii. 34.
of dignity instead of humility, i. 174.
and reconciliation, ii. 272.
v. religion, i. 271.
task of, i, 6, 8, 72, 73.
true, i, 214.
Church and State, proper aims of, ii. 267.
separation, rejected by the Genevese people, ii. 297.
Churches (the) and Jesus, ii. 3.
Churchyard, reflections in a, ii. 170.
Cid and Rodogune, artificiality of, i. 196.
Circumstances, force of, ii. 197.
influence of, i. 232.
Civilisation, corrupting tendency of, ii. 287.
confounded with the inner life, i. 92.
in the light of religion, ii. 55.
Claparéde, Edouard, i. 292.
Classification of men, twofold, ii. 322.
Cleanthus, ii. 31.
Cleons, modern, i. 214.
Clever folk defined, ii. 246.
Cleverness, negative character of, i. 300.
Cohabitation of individuals, man’s chief problem, ii. 262.
Cohesion essential to society, i. 277.
Comic poets, vé/e of the, ii. 215.
Common sense, i. 76.
v. the ideal, i. 126.
rebellion against, ii. 168.
worship, i. 44.
Commune of Paris, ii. 105.
Compliance, good-humoured, ii. 154.
Composition, Amiel’s laborious, ii. 191.
the process of, ii. 244.
Compound character of Amiel, ii. 42.

370 INDEX.

Condorcet’s theory, i. 92.
Conflict, man’s perpetual, ii. 225.
Conscience, ii. 134.

abdication of the, ii. 69.

appeal of, i. 17, 21.

v. cleverness, ii. 216.

corruption of the, i. 240.

and faith, i. 107, 108.

and history, i. 36.

individualised by, i. 254.

v. reality, ii. 59.

v. taste, ii. 269.

the voice of God, ii. 266.
Consciousness compared to a book, ii. 165.
* Consideration,’ definition of, ii. 186.

unsought by Amiel, ii. 186.
Constant, Benjamin, ii. 185.
Contemplation, Amiel’s mz7zeu, i. 303-

contrasted with action, i. 303.

passionate temperament incapable of, i. 291.
Contentment, ii. 311.

apostolic, ii. 7.

and submission, ii. 177.
Contradictory aspirations, ii. 213.
Contraries, marriage of, ii. 196.
Coppée Frangois, ii. 195.
Coquerel, ii. 37.
Corinne, 1, 141.
Corneille’s heroes, »é/es not men, i. 198.
Courage, Amiel’s want of, ii. 145.
Creation, the act of, ii. 194-
Credulity, freedom from, 1. 276.
Creed, Amiel’s want of a, ii. 157.
Critic, the, i. 76.

the conscientious, i. 152.

the true, ii. 40, 51, 245, 248, 255+

INDEX. 371

Critical faculty, abuse of the, i. 114.
lucidity, ii. 125.

Criticism a gift, ii. 248.
indifferent, i. 193.

Cross, apotheosis of the, ii. 63, 65.
(one’s) made heavier by repulsion, i. 11.

Crowd (the) and the individual, i. 254.
instinct and passion of the, ii. 163.

Crowd worship, i. 227.

Crucifixion, the, ii. 63.

Culture, modern, ii. 255.

Cynic, egotism of the, ii. 87.

DanTE, i. 81.
in hell, i. 243.
Darwinism, ii. 237.
counterpoised by equality, ii. 267.
inconsistencies of, ii. 213.
Dead and living, the, ii. 171.
want of respect for the, i. 177.
Death, i. 102.
Amiel’s anticipation of, ii. 335-342.
anticipation of, ii. 249-253.
certainty of, i. 168.
death of, ii. 63.
speculations respecting, ii. 166.
De Candolle, ii. 5.
Democracy unfavourable to high art, i. 292.
evil results of, ii. 5.
fickleness of, ii. 103.
fiction of, i. 231; ii. 104. —
results of, ii. 294.
weakness of, ii. 84.
Democratic era, i. 29, 227-232.
Demos, stupidity of, ii. 103.
Dependence and liberty, i. 267.

372 INDEX.

Depersonalisation, Amiel’s, ii. 304.
Descartes on fame, ii. 211.
Desert, the traveller of the, ii. 282.
Desolation and daylight, ii. 138.
Despair, resignation of, ii. 178.
Despotic government and intellectual anarchy, i. 277.
Despotism, i, 267.

and materialism, i. 60.

of Russia, i. 122.
Detritus of past eras, ti. 147-
Diderot, i. 311.
* Die unto sin,’ i. 158.
Discontentment, i. 151.
Discouragement, Amiel’s sin, i. 181.
Discrimen ingentorum, i. 84.
Disraeli’s Lothazr, ii. 67.
Distilled history, ii. 205.
Divine, glimpses of the, i. 107.

and human union, ii. 18.

will, acceptation of the, ti. 220.
Divinity, multiplication of, ii. 308.
Doctor, the model, ii. 153.
Doctors, causes of their mistakes, ii. 152.
Dollar, the almighty, ii. 62.
Double, a characteristic of perfection, i. 224.
Double-faced life, i. 22.
Doubt, i. 158.

and atheism, ii. 17.

and obedience, i. 277.
Doudan’s Lettres et Mélanges, ii. 207-211.
Dragonfly symbol, ii. 283.
Dream-aspect of life, i. 220.
Dreaming, i. 153-
Dreamland and action, ii. 291.
Dreams, ii. 9.

helpfulness of, i. 178.

INDEX. 373

Duped, fear of being, ii. 16.
Dupes, mental, ii. 198.
Dutchman, twofold aspect of the, ii. 150.
Duty, i. 5, 20, 134, 156; ii. 86, 275.
double power of, i. 8.
ignored by both equality and Darwinism, ii. 267.
negative, ii. 92.
and pleasure, ii. 190.
power of the idea of, i. 190.
the human pole-star, i. 296.
the sign of nobility, i. 269.
the viaticum of life, ii. 26.
and trial, i, 260.
v. the individual, ii. 295.
Dying, words and looks of the, ii. 14, 15.

East and West contrasted, i. 251.
Ecclesiastical struggles, worthlessness of, i. 270, 271.
Education and development, ii. go.
Effect, the misfortune of Victor Hugo, i. 202.
Effort of modern morality, ii. gt.
Ego, Claparéde’s view of the, i. 292, 293.
Egotism, i. 30, 36.
Eighteenth century criticism, ii. 160.
Emerson’s ideal, i, 37, 46.
English children, ii. 126.
homes, attractiveness of, ii. 126.
Englishmen, twofold character of, i. 264.
Enthusiasm, cultivation of, i. 212.
two forms of, ii. 140.
Enthusiastic women, ii. 140.
Epicureanism, intellectual, i. 190.
Epicurism, ii, 53.
Epicurus, ii. 276.
Epigrammatic productions, ii. 318.
Equality a bad principle, i. 215, 229.
doctrines ii. 104.

374 INDEX.

Equality of functions, American, ii. 61.
results of, i. 28-30; ii. 5, 263.
the counterpoise of Darwinism, ii. 267.

Equilibrium of forces, i. 120.

‘ Errare, humanum est,’ ii. 290,

Error, emancipation from, ii. 125.

Errors, moral and psychological, ii, 161.

E sempre bene, ii. 310.

Esoteric beauty, ii. 113.

Esprit defined, ii. 257.

Essay, function of the, ii. 235. © [- 1 k ne

Etrangéres, Amiel’s, ii. 199.
Evil, problem of, ii. 29.

transfiguration of, i. 97.

ignored by Pelletan, i. 92.

by V. Hugo, i. 200.

Examination v. affirmation, ii. 123.
Example, a good, ii. 105.

importance of, i. 54.
Existence, submission to the laws of, ii. 154.

Experience, individual and collective, ii. 159.

Extempore preachers, ii. 138.
Extremes, reconciliation of, ii. 129.

FAIR-MINDEDNESS, rarity of, ii. 221.
Fairy tales, their truth, i. 46.

ee

Fats ce que dois, advienne que pourra, ii. 266.

Faith defined, ii. 118.
has no proofs, ii. 276.
narrow wv. enlightened, ii. 120.
of the present, the, ii. 212.
and science, ii. 66.
and truth, ii. 119.

False flag of Christendom, ii. 215.
originality, ii. 230.
shame, Amiel’s, ii. 145.

INDEX. 375

Fame, achievement of, ii. 211.
amily life, value of, ii. 127.
Fanatics, Indian, ii. 22.
Fastidium, how to avoid, ii. 309.
Faust, i. 157.
Feeling v. irony, ii. 217.
precedes will, i. 88.
respect for, i. 48.
Feeling, suppression of, ii. 87, 97-
the bread of angels, i. 238.
and thought, ii. 139.
Feminine nature, infirmity of the, ii. 139.
Festinat ad eventum, ii. 346.
Feuerbach, i. 25.
Feuille Centrale de Zofingen, ii. 308.
Fiat justitia, pereat mundus, ii. 59.
Fichte, i. 36, 294.
Finite and infinite, ii. 170.
Flanerie, i. 52.
Flattery of the multitude, ii. 162.
Fog, poetry of, i. 260.
Fontaine’s defects and beauties, ii. 230.
Fontanés, ii. 37.
Fools, behaviour towards, i. 103.
Force, external, ii. 214.
Forces, opposing, i. 120.
Fragmentary contemplation, ii. 255.
France, Christianity in, ii. 232.
fundamental error of, ii. 141.
v. Geneva, ii. 306.
and Germany, ii. 97-
philosophic superficiality of, i. 93.
the centre of the world, i. 289.
Francis of Assisi, i. 274.
Frankness and self-knowledge, women deficient in, ii.
16.

376 INDEX.

Freethinkers, puerility of the, ii. 68.

Freethought, republic of, ii. 160.

French Academy, eloquence of the, ii. 183.
drama, an oratorical tournament, i. 199.
and German literature contrasted, i. 312.
ignorance of liberty, ii. 74.
literary method, ii. 75.
love of zsthetics, ii. 236.
mind, i. 186; ii. 179.
philosophy, i. 141.
poets, modern, ii. 243.
symbolical authority of the, ii. 75.
republicanism, ii. 80.
vivacity of the, i. 199.

Friends, choice of, ii. 324.

Future state, mystery of the, i. 283; ii. 41.

Gatety and sadness, ii. 245.
Galiani, i. 312.
Gallery, playing to the, ii. 180, 186.
Galley-slaves, modern, ii. gt.
Geneva, appeal to, ii. 297.
characteristics of, ii. 30r.
v. France, ii. 306.
oath of old, ii. 331.
Genevese Liberalism, i. 145.
Genghis Khan, ii. 285.
Genius and talent, i. 134.
writers of, ii. 48.
Gentleman defined, i. 262, 265.
the Shibboleth of England, i. 262.
German and French literature contrasted, i. 312.
novels, ii. 97.
society, vulgarity of, ii. 97.
thinkers, their repugnance to public life, i. 68.
Germanic mind, tendency of the, ii. 239.

INDEX.

Germans, artistic devotion of the, ii. 239.
the, masters of the philosophy of life, i. 119.
Germany and France, ii. 95.
Germs of good and bad in every heart, i. 226.
Gethsemane, ii. 338.
Ghost, Amiel a living, ii. 314.
Gifts considered acquisitions, i. 57.
Gioberti on the French mind, ii. 178.
Gioconda, la, ii. 196, 256.
Glory of God, ii. 220.
Glow-worm, i. 58.
God, communion with, i. 1.
conquest of, i. 98, 115.
harmony with, i. 286; ii. 7.
life in, i. 214.
*God and my right,’ i. 262; ii. 127.
and Nature contrasted, i. 250.
recognition of, ii. 69.

377

submission to, i. 258; ii. 178, 334, 335) 347) 350-

will of, ii. 173.

God's love and chastisement, ii. 272.
omnipresence, ii. 198.
perfection, ii. go.

Goethe, i. 45.
contrasted with Rousseau, i, 248.
on fame, ii, 211.
on self-obscurity, i. 185.

Goethe’s want of soul, ii. 107.
complex nature, ii. 108.

‘Good news’ of Christianity, ii. 17.

* Good society,’ ii. 97.

Good, sum of, perhaps always the same, ii. 6.
victory of, i. 2413 ii. 29.

Goodness and beauty, ii. 217.
character of, ii. 263.
conquests of, ii. 238.

378 INDEX.

Goodness, philosophy of, ii. 168.
the truest judge, ii. 317.
Gospel, Amiel’s belief in the, ii. 157.
blessings of the, ii. 2.
the Eternal, ii. 19.
why successful, ii. 109.
Great men, i. 249.
and small things, ii. 197.
Greeks, changes in character of the, i. 245.
lessons from the, i. 71.
Grief, luxury of, ii. 117.
results of, i. 104.
Griefs which cannot be shared, ii. 334.
Growing old, ii. 310.

Habere non haber?, i. 85.
Habit, Amiel a creature of, i. 257.
Habits, life a tissue of, i. rz.
Happiness, Amiel’s thirst for, ii. 137.

contagious, ii. 53.

cumulative, i. 97.

defined, ii. 275.

dreams about, i. 126.

enjoyment of, i. 58.

impossible, i. 258.

pursuit of, ii. 26.

the best, ii. 223.

universal yearning for, ii. 272.
Harmony, ii. 57.

blessings of, ii. 92.

longing for, ii, 268.
Hartmann, ii. 115.

his Philosophy of the Unconscious, ii. 52.
Havet’s Origines du Christianisme, ii. 160.
Head and heart, i. 23.
Healing power of life, i. 192.

INDEX. - 379

Health, fraility of, i. 167.
loss of, ii. 173.
and happiness, ii. 178.
and the outer world, ii. 100.
Heart and intellect, ii. 247, 309.
the mainspring of life, i. 232, 260.
yearnings of the, i. 257.
Heartless books, ii. 318.
Heavenly moments, ii. 111.
Hegel, i. 218; ii. 160, 203.
and Leibnitz, ii. ror.
Heim, Charles, i. 273; ii. 14.
Heine and Lamennais contrasted, ii. 39.
Heraclitus, saying of, ii. 133.
Herder’s Lichtstrahlen, ii. 47.
Hermits and the world, ii. 246.
Heroism, i. 8.
Hindoo genius, the, ii. 189.
Hirn’s three principles, ii. 37.
Historical justice, tardiness of, ii. 346.
law of tempests, ii. 287.
History and conscience, i. 36.
three views of, ii. 22.
varied views of, i. 307.
Holiness v. liberty, i. 303.
requisites for, ii. 151.
Hope and duty, i. 296.
influence of, ii. 72.
and melancholy, ii. 158.
not forbidden, ii. 171.
Hora est benefaciendi, ii. 182.
Horace, ii. 232.
Hugo, Victor, a Gallicised Spaniard, i. 204.
his exaggerations, ii. 226.
his Contemplations, i. 189.
his literary and Titanic power, i, 202-205.

380 INDEX.

Hugo, his Misérables, i. 199-
Parts, ii. 225.

Human and Divine union, ii. 18.
life, the three modes of (action, thought, speech),

i, 216.
personality ignored, i. 138.
solidarity, i. 267.

Humanism and religion, i. 22-25.
of Cherbuliez, i. 219.

Humanity, a higher standard of, i. 276.
benefactors and masters of, ii. 54.
candidates for, ii. 241.
ideal of, i. 30.
slow development of, ii. 214, 261, 326.
toughness of, ii. 105.

Humboldt, ii. 106.

Humility precedes repentance, i. 117.
(true) = contentment, i. 103.

Humorist, the true, i. 299.

Hyacinthe, Pére, ii. 138.

Hypocrisy and deception, i. 196.

IDEAL conceptions, ii. 261.
Ideal, diminution of the, ii. 36.
malady of the, i. 126.
v. material, i. 228.
v. real, i. 46, 60-62, 234.
thirst for the, ii. 274.
Ideals, hypocritical, ii, 316.
Ideas, anarchy of, ii. 221.
formation of, ii. 195.
Ill-health, Amiel’s, ii. 177, 201. .
Ill-nature, conquest of, ii. 319.
Illness, summonses of, i. 167.
Illusion, benefit of, ii. 73.
Illusions, human, i. 308; ii. 26, 289.
Illustrious men, disappearance of, i. 16.

INDEX.

Imagination v. character, i. 18,
enfranchised, ii, 130-132.
influence of, ii. 48.
of Rousseau, i. 245.
Immortality, belief in, i. 295.
consolations of, ii. 155.
and annihilation, i. 160.
Impersonality, ii. 49.
temptations of, ii. 259.
Indecision, i. 135.
Amiel’s, ii. 233.
Independence, Amiel’s, ii. 330.
twofold aspect of, ii. 55.
Independent thought of Geneva, ii. 306.
Indifference of cultivated classes, ii. 87.
Indignation, incapacity for, ii. 117.
Individual and society, ii. 2go.
(the) v. duty, ii. 295.
Individualism an absurdity, i. 310.
epoch of, i. 266.
and equality, i. 28.
evils of, ii. 266.
Individuality = character and temperament, ii
rarity of, ii. 241.
Inevitable, Amiel’s resignation to the, ii. 219.
acceptance of the, ii. 289.
the, ii. 206.
Infallibility of judgment rare, ii. 51.
Infinite, communion with the, i. 46-48.
penetration of the, ii. 291.
thirst for the, ii. 297.
Infinites, infinity of, ii. 89.
Influence of men of action, ii. 290.
Injustice, Amiel too sensitive to, ii. 332.
Inner life essential, i. 253.
Instinct precedes feeling, i. 88.

381

- 46, 47-

382 INDEX.

Institutions, capacity of, ii. 84.
Instruction and amusement, ii, 269.
Insubordination, increase of, i. 229.
Intellect, aristocratic character of the, ii. 264.
and heart, ii. 247, 309.
religion of, i. 23.
and stupidity, ii. 218.
Intellectualism, ii. 134.
Interests, want of, i. 289.
International influences, ii. 97.
Internationale, the, ii. 102.
Introspection, ii. tor.
Intuition, ii. 317.
Invalid, individuality of every, ii. 152.
Invisible, the universal witness to the, ii. 271.
Involution, ii. 220.
Trony, law of, ii. 213.
Irreparable, thought of the, i, 285; ii. 23.
Isms, the modern, ii. 302.
Italy, Christianity in, ii. 233.

JANSENISTS v. Jesuits, ii. 276.
Jesuits v- Jansenists, ii. 276.
Jesus and the churches, ii. 3.
and Socrates, i. 23.
comprehension of, i. 6-8.
faith of, ii. 19.
Job’s murmurings, i. 117; trials, ii. 348.
Yocelyn and Paul et Virginie, tenderness and purity
of, i. 191.
Yohn Halifax, Gentleman, i. 261.
Joubert, i. 11-14. >
Doudan’s resemblance to, ii. 208.
Journal, Amiel’s estimate of his, ii. 204.
function of the private, i. 41, 42; ii. 235+
Joy expressed by tears, i. 242.
Judaism of nineteenth century, i. 6.

INDEX. 383

Judgment, impersonality of, i. 134.
of character, ii. 317.
self-interested, ii. 88.
and understanding, ii. 110.
Justice defined, ii. 237.
forgetfulness of, ii. 88.
wv. love, i. 200; ii. 60.
will ultimately prevail, ii. 344, 345.

Kant’s radicale Bése, ii. 55.

Kindness and wariness incompatible, ii. 264.
the principle of tact, i. 35.

Krause’s religious serenity, i. 44.

Laboremus, ii. 50.
Laborious lives, ii. 85.
Labour question unsolved, i. 73.
La Bruyére, ii. 232.
La Fontaine, ii. 209.
Lamartine, ii. 5x.

his Préludes, ii. 181.

his dislike of Fontaine, ii. 232.
Lamennais, i. 245.

contrasted with Heine, ii. 39.
Laprade, Victor de, affectation of, ii. 284.
Last words and looks of the dying, ii. 14, 15.
Latent genius, i. 156.
Latin world, the, ii. 122, 240.
Laveleye’s L’Aventr Religieux, ii. 212.
Law, eternity of, ii, 261.
Lectures, Amiel’s, ii. 272.
Legal fictions and institutions, ii. 38.
Legouvé’s Nos fils et nos filles, ii. 268.
Leibnitz, ii. 29.

v. Hegel, ii. ror.

and Spinoza, ii. 343.
Lessing’s principle, i. ror.

384 INDEX.

Letter and spirit, i. 60.
Letters, studied, ii. 257.
Leveller, the modern, i. 214.
Levelling down, ii. 5.
Liberalism, political, ii. 35.
Liberty and religion, ii. 67.
and revolution, ii. 81.
diminished by democracy, i. 230.
in God, i. 82.
possible suppression of, ii. 70.
the true friends of, ii. 70.
true, ii. 326.
v. authority, ii. 37.
v. holiness, i. 303.
Life, aim of, i. 98.
a calvary, i. 158.
a dream, i. 293.
a perpetual combat, ii. 213.
brevity of, i. 216, 249, 256, 283;. ii. 24, 78, 82, 201.
« definition of, ii. 205.
different aspects of, ii. 25.
drama, a monologue, i. 129.
frailty of, ii. 283.
matter to be spiritualised, ii. 313.
melancholy aspect of, i. 208.
ocean of, i. 87.
proper treatment of, ii. 289.
Life, the Divine, ii. 61.
the true, ii. 327.
tenacity of, ii. 333.
v. logic, ii. 146.
Light and beauty, i. 205, 206.
without warmth, i. 24.
Link of humanity, the, ii. 271.
Literary ambition, Amiel’s, ii. 237.
career, Amiel’s impediments to a, i. gt.
gentlemen, ii. 183.

INDEX. 385

Literature and science, ii. 94, 95-
Little things, influence of, i. 305.
Logic v. life, ii. 146.
* Lorelei,’ ii, 238.
Lotze, i. 311.
Lovable, Amiel’s taste for the, ii. 310.
Love, i. 41, 156.
a young girl’s, ii. 176.
and contemplation, i. 180.
and knowledge, i. 24.
and holiness, power of, ii. 35.
eminently religious, i. 209, 284.
tendency to postpone, ii. 15.
wv. justice, i. 200; ii. 60.
woman’s supreme authority, ii. 60.
Lucian aad Augustine contrasted, ii. 217.
Luck, good, i. 306.
Luther on humanity, ii. 103.

Maovness defined, ii. 133, 305.

Maia, ii. 83, 131, 134.

Malignity of the world, ii. 331.

Man and woman contrasted, ii. 60, 61.

* Man,’ in essence and principle, ii. 190.
the true, i. 60.

Mannerisms, ii. 233.

Manou on Woman, ii. 33.

Many, the, and the few, i. 267.

Marcus Aurelius, aim of, i. 213.

Martyrdom, nobility of, ii. 328.

Martyrs, ii. 22.

Masses, frivolity of the, i. 252.
impetuosity of the, ii. 163.
the, and demagogues, ii. 104.

Material results, ii. 327.

Materialism, i. 30, 60, 237.

386 INDEX.

Mathematical and historical intelligence, i. 84.
v, sensuous minds, i, 120.
May, caprices of, ii. 32.
Mediocrity, era of, i. 28.
the result of equality, ii. 5.
Meditation, joys of silent, ii. 277.
Melancholy, Amiel’s tendency to, i. 279, 285; ii. 8, 77,
82, 92, 171, 172, 188, 189.
and hope, ii. 158.
below the surface, i. 102.
universality of, i. 227.
Memories, painful, ii. 247.
Memory a catacomb, Amiel’s, ii. 303.
deficient, i. 115.
Men and things, Amiel’s relation to, i. 187.
Mephistopheles, weakness of, ii. 87.
Mérimée’s letters to Panizzi, ii. 345.
Method in religion, secondary, ii. 271.
Michelet, i. 93.
Milieu, a wholesome, ii. 223.
Millennium, the, ii. 345.
Mind and soul, ii. 199.
and the infinite, li. 260.
described, ii. 308, 315-
forms and metamorphoses of (the one dpe of
study), i. 2.
not phenomenal, ii. 199.
science of, ii. 168.
the march of, ii. 343.
Minds, abstract and concrete, i. 83-
well-governed, i. 292.
Minors in perpetuity, ii. 69.
Miracles, ii. 121.
Misérables, Victor Hugo's, i. 199.
Misspent time, ii. 184.
Mist and sunshine, i. 260, 261.

INDEX. 387

Misunderstandings, i. 4, 280.
Modern man, character of the, ii. 251.
‘Modern spirit,’ the, ii. 107.
Modesty, i. 76.
* Moi,’ the central consciousness, ii, 201.
Moliére, ii. 232.
on reasoning, ii. 92.
Monad, the human, ii. 144.
Monads, conscious, ii. 206.
Mongol invasion, ii. 286.
Monod, Adolphe, i. 31.
Montaigne, ii. 232.
Montesquieu, ii. 142.
saying of, ii. 162.
Moonlight reflections, ii. 157.
Moralists, sugar, ii. 269.
Moral law, reconciliation of faith and science by the,
ii. 156.
philosophy of Geneva, ii. 305.
v. natural, ii. 59.
wv. physical science, ii. 168.
Morals, psychology and system of, i. 80.
Morning and evening conditions, i. 78.
Mortification, ii. 65.
Mozart and Beethoven contrasted, i. 88, 89.
Much ado about nothing,’ ii. 200.
Mulock, Miss, i. 261.
Multitude, flattery of the, ii. 161, 162.
Music, Wagner’s, depersonalised, i. 136-138.
effects of, ii. 57.
Musician, the modern, ii. 229.
Musset on De Laprade, ii. 285.
Mystery of Providence, ii. 307.
Mysticism, so-called, i. gg.

NAPpo.eon, i. 306.
National competitions, ii. 6.

388 INDEX.

National, types, i. 265.
preferences unknown to Amiel, ii. 227.
Nationalities, ancient and modern, i. 95.
imply prejudice, i. 194.
Quinet’s studies of, i. 171.
Nationality and the State, i. 134.
Nations, destinies of (A&schylus), ii. 136.
Natural man, the, ii. 55-57-
v. moral, ii. 58, 59.
Naturalist thinkers (@votxol), ii. 167.
Nature, Amiel’s enjoyment of, i. 287; ii. 1, 11, 27, 75,
II0, 174, 181, 182, 235, 247, 270, 280, 306, 316.
enjoyment of, i. 5, 26, 42, 43, 50-52, 64-66, 73, 745
100, 102, 140, 182, 183, 186, 188-190, 223, 224,
237, 238.
continuity of, ii. 309.
v. conventions, ii. 239.
and God contrasted, i. 250.
the kindly voice of, ii. 316.
the law of, ii. 58.
without man, i. 137-
worship of, ii. 107.
Naville, Ernest, i. 142.
on The Eternal Life, i. 161-165.
Neckar, the river, i. 183.
Necker de Saussure, Madame, ii. 293, 305-
Negative minds, danger of, i. 194.
Neo-Hegelians, i. 22.
New birth, the, i. 159.
Nicole and Pascal, ii. 48.
Nihilism, Russian, ii. 102.
Nirvana, ii. 279.
Nobility, true, i. 261.
and vulgarity, i. 227...
Normal, the, to be chosen, ii. 159.
North, poetry of the, i. 74.

INDEX.

Nostalgia of happiness, i. 153.
Nothing is lost, i. 217.
Nothingness, ii. 73.
man’s, ii. 78, 82.
realisation of, i. 128.

Osepience the chief mark of religion, ii. 176.
Obermann, ii. 52.
Oblivion man’s portion, ii. 282.
Obscure self, the, i. 130.
Obstinacy, i. 165.
Odyssey, the divine, i. 61.
Old age, ii. 247.
our views clearest in, ii. 277.
Old, the art of growing, ii. 177.
Olivier’s Chansons du Soir, ii. 92.
Opinion, i. 39.
and belief, ii. 322.
too much despised by Amiel, ii. 332.
Optimism and pessimism, ii. 29, 155-
Orators, ii. 140.
Order, i. 166.
attempts at, ii. 262.
harmony with universal, ii, 224.
and law, ii. 80.
the only positive good, ii. 275.
Oriental element, benefit of the, i. 252.
happiness, ii. 278.
Originality, modern lack of, ii. 241.
ridicule the result of, ii. 164.
Origins all secret, ii. 194.
Outside and inside, i. 25, 60, ror; ii. 180,
Overrating, result of, ii. 117.
Oxygen and azote, human, ii. 218.

PaIn, i. rrr, 118.
and comfort, i. 32.

389

390 INDEX.

Pantheism, i. 261.
of Krause, ii. 122.
Pantheistic disinterestedness, ii. 190.
Paradise, echoes of, ii. 57.
Paradox, i. 246.
Paris, the French townsman’s axis, i. 290.
Pascal, ii. 217.
and Nicole, ii. 48.
on development, i. 229.
Passion and reason, ii. 84.
Passionless man, the, i. 135.
Passions, life of the, i. 109.
conquest of the, i. 184.
Past, poetry of the, i. 255-
Reminiscences of the, i. 235-237-
the interpreter of the present, ii. 143-
woman, the priestess of the, ii. 135.
Pathos and beauty, i. 153.
Patience, the test of virtue, i. 259.
Peace, ii. 225.
“true, i. 285.
twofold aspect of, ii. 152.
Pedantic books, i. 311.
Pelletan’s Profession de fot, i. 92.
Pensée writers, i. 16.
Penseroso, Amiel’s, ii. 10.
People, emotion of the, ii. 298.
Perfection as an end, i. 272.
attainment of, ii. 203.
of God, ii. go.
search for, i. 114.
Perstflage, ii. 318.
Pessimism, ii. 115.
and optimism, ii. 29, 155+
Amiel’s tendency to, i. 285.
helplessness of, ii. 49.

INDEX.

Petifi’s poems, ii. 285.
Pharisaical people, ii. 299.
Philistinism, increase of, ii. 4, 5.
Philosopher, ambition of the, ii. 268.
Philosophy defined, ii. 124.
and religion, ii. 66.
Physical v. moral science, ii. 168.
Piety defined, ii. 265.
and religion contrasted, i. 227.
Pity, exhibition of, ii. 243.
and contempt, i. 309.
Plaid, the chivalrous, i. 235.
Plato v. Saint Paul, ii. ror.
Plato’s Dialogues, i. 89.
Playthings of the world, i. 268.
Pleasure and duty, ii. 190.
Plotinus and Proclus, ii. 279.
Plutolatry, ii. 62.
Poet and philosophy contrasted, i. 82.
Poetry flayed by science, ii. 95.
of childhood and mature age, i. 175.
the expression of a soul, ii. 254.
Points, straining after, ii. 193.
Political liberty of England, i. 277.
windbags, ii. 266.
Politician, aim of the honest, ii. 162.
Popular harangues, ii. 140.
Portraits and wax figures contrasted, ii. 253.
Poverty a crime in England, i. 263.
Practical life, Amiel unsuited for, ii. 43.
Prayer, blessings of, ii. 265.
Prejudice essential to nationalities, i. 194.
better than doubt, i. 195.
Prestige, French worship of, ii. 95.
Pride and discouragement, i. 11.
moral and religious, ii. 317.

39!

392 INDEX.

Pride, two conditions of, i. 99.
Priesthood, domination of the, ii. 69.
Prince Vitale, Cherbuliez, i. 217.
Principiis obsta, ii. 56.

Privilege only temporary, ii. 323.
Professor, obligations of a, ii. 187.
Professorial lectures, ii. 272-274.
Progress, absolute and relative, ii. 159.

results of, ii. 325.

Victor Hugo’s religion of, i. 200, 202.
Protestant v. Catholic countries, ii. 67.
Protestantism defined, i. 270,

advance guard of, ii. 38.

historical, ii. 37.

Protestants, liberal, ii. 37-39.
Proudhon, i. 245.
his axiom, ii. 116.
Providence, ii. 172
Province defined, ii. 302.
Psychological study, Amiel’s aptitude for, ii. 43.
Psychologist, the, ii. 99.
Psychology, applied, ii. 200, 203.
Punctum saliens, ii. 315.
Punishment softened by faith, i. 117.

QUANTITATIVE and qualitative, i. 92, 93.
Quinet, i. 93.
Quintilian, saying of, ii. 140.

RABELAIS, ii. 232.

Racine, i- 197, 202.

Radical jugglery, ii. 162.
Rain, the country in, ii. 112.
Rationalism, i. 174.
Ready-made ideas, i. ror.
Real and ideal, i. 234; ii. 274.

INDEX. 393

Realism in painting, ii. 253.
suppression of, ii. 98.
Reality and appearance, ii. 180.
character with no sense of, i. 289.
Reason and passion, ii. 84.
Reconciliation and Christianity, ii. 272. °
Redeemed, motive power of the, ii. 18.
Regenerate man, ii. 57.
Reinvolution, psychological, ii. 315.
Religion and liberty, ii. 67.
and philosophy, ii. 32, 38, 66.
and piety contrasted, i. 227.
indestructible, i. 278.
life in God, ii. 31.
phases of, ii. 265.
refreshing power of, i. 252.
and Utilitarianism, ii, 212.
without mysticism, i. 178.
Religions, multitude of, i. 308.
effect of political, ii. 233.
Religious man, the (an intermediary), ii. 224.
views, Amiel’s, ii. 336.
Reminiscences, vague, i. 207.
Renaissance, the, Fontaine’s horizon, ii. 232.
Renan, i. 312.
his object, style, ii. 236.
Renan’s Les Evangziles, ii, 236.
Vie de Fesus, ii. 108.
St. Paul, ii. 40.
René and Atala, Chateaubriand’s, i. 146-151.
Renunciation, benefit of, ii. 328.
Repentance and sanctification too exclusively preached,
i. 178.
simple, ii. 64.
Republic, the normal, ii. 303.
Repugnance, Amiel’s twofold, ii. 299.

394 INDEX.

Resignation, manly, i. 45.
Responsibility, i. 20.
dread of, i. 67.
Restlessness, Amiel’s, i. 123-126.
Reveries, i. 48-52.
Réville, it. 37.
Revolt instinctive, ii. 55.
Revolution and Catholicism, ii. 67.
v. liberty, ii. 81.
Ridicule, fear of, ii. 164.
Right apart from duty, a compass with one leg, ii. 266.
Rights, abstract, ii. 266.
River, a beautiful life compared to a, ii. 311.
Roads, high and cross, ii. 158, 159.
Réle, our twofold, ii. 340.
Romance peoples, the, i, rrg.
Rosenkrantz’s History of Poetry, i. 118.
on Hegel’s logic, i. 186,
Rousseau and Chateaubriand, i. 146-151.
an ancestor in all things, i. 247.
his letter to Archbishop Beaumont, i. 244.
his regard for style, ii. 236.
on savage life, ii. 196,
Ruge’s Die Academie, i. 22, 25.
Russian national character, i. r2r.

SACERDOTAL dogmatism, i. 174.
Sadness and gaiety, ii. 245.
St. Evremond, ii. 232.

James’s Epistle, i. 52.

John’s Gospel, i. 6.

Martin’s summer, i. 73.

Paul and St. John, i. 31.

Paul and Plato, ii. ror.

Simon and Bayle, ii. 48.
Sainte-Beuve, i. 312; ii. 50, 185, 208.

INDEX.

Saintly alchemy, ii. 17.
Sanctification implies martyrdom, i. 156.
Sarcasm, repulsiveness of, ii. 319.
Satan, possible conversion of, i. 241.
the father of lies, i. 240.
his territory, i. 174.
Satiety, preservative against, ii. 309.
Satirist, the, i. 299.
Savoir vivre, ii. 98.
Scepticism and intellectual independence, i. 276.
Schelling, i. 293.
Schellingian speculation, ii. 13.
Scherer, i. 44, 273, 312; ii. 57, 80.
Scheveningen, ii. 146.
Schiller on superiority and perfection, i. 175.
Schleiermacher, i. 174; ii. 106.
his Monologues, i. 36.
Scholasticism, ii. 123.
Schopenhauer, i ii. 29, 45, 455 47, 53+
his pessimism, Tete
Science and faith, ii. 66, 117, 156.
and literature, ii. 94.
and religion. ii. 167.
and wisdom, i. 232.
march of, ii. 221.
weakness of, i. 47.
Sea, the, ii. 147.
conversation of the, i. 29.
Secrétan’s philosophy, ii. 12.
Secrets, hidden, i. 103.
Seed-sowing, i. 53.
Self-abandonment, i. 18c
-annihilation of, ii. 224.
-approval and self-contempt, 1. 99.

-conquest, i. 155.
f

-contempt, excessive, ii. gr.

395

396 INDEX.

Self-abandonment, conversation with, ii, 234.
-criticism, i. 184.
-distrust, Amiel’s, i. 110, 114, 173, 272.
-education, hatred of, ii. 222,
-glorification, i. 143.
-government misunderstood, ii. 302.
-ignorance, cause of, i. 279.
-interest v. truth, ii. 20, 2r.
-love, i. 103, 111.
-preservation a duty, ii. 250.
-renewal, ii. 106.
-renunciation, i. 4, 112, 128; ii. 9.
-rule the essence of gentlemanliness, i, 263.
-sacrifice, ii. 86, 173.
Selfishness and individual rights, ii. 266.
Seneca, ii. 37.
Sensation, nature of, i. 292.
Sensorium commune of nature, ii. 308.
Separation of modern society, ii. 87.
Separatism, ii. 302.
Septimius Severus, motto of, ii. 50.
Sex, the virtue of, ii. 61.
Shadow and substance, ii. 178.
Shakespeare, i. 197.
Siefert’s Louise, Les Stotgues, ii. 129.
Silence and repose, i. 291.
effect of, i. 45.
of nature, ii. 312.
Sin, definition of, ii. 56.
frivolous idea of, ii. 135.
pardon of, ii. 18.
the cardinal question, i. 23. -
Singing, rustic, i. 143.
Sismondi, i. 144.
Sivaism, ii. 115.
Slavery, i. 73.

INDEX. 397

Sleep, i. 85.
Soap-bubble symbol, ii. 283.
Social charity and harsh justice, i. 201.
Socialism, international, ii. 102.
Society, ii. 97.
and the individual, ii. 224.
Socit Det sumus (Seneca), ii. 31.
Socrates and Jesus, i. 23.
Solitariness of life, i. 128.
Solitary life, Amiel’s, i. 152.
Solitude, human, ii. 335.
Soul, abyss of the, ii. 88.
and mind, ii. 199.
Soul, dominical state of the, ii. 278.
ghosts of the, i. 208.
history of a, ii. 205.
three powers of the (counsel, judgment, and action),
1. II3- .
Soul’s wants ignored by the Church, i. 177.
Southern Europe, statesmen of, ii. 70.
theatre, masks of the, i. 197.
Sparrenhorn, ascent of the, ii. 76.
Speech, mystery of, i. 53.
Spinoza, i. 109.
and Leibnitz, ii. 343.
Spirit, voice of the Holy, ii. 224.
Spiritual existence, ii. 260.
Spontaneity, the question of, ii. ror.
Staél, Madame de, ii. 185, 191.
on nationalities, ii. 228.
her ZL’ Allemagne, ii. 305.
Stahl’s Les histotres de mon Parrain, ii. 268.
State, the model, ii. 96.
true foundations of a, ii. 86.
Statistical progress and moral decline, i. 29.
Stendhal, ii. 94.

398 INDEX.

Stoicism, ii. 167.
and suicide, i. 295.

Stoics, the, i. 109.

Strauss, ii. 320.

Struggle of opposing forces, ii. 268.

Stupidity and intellect, ii. 218.

Style, Renan’s main object, ii. 236.

Sub-Alpine history, i. 95.

Subjectivity and objectivity, i. 33, 72, 139, 187
of experience, i. 292.

Submission, ii. 285, 290.
not defeat, i. 269.

Subtleties not helpful, ii. 289.

Subtlety and taste, ii. 209.

Success, i. 306.

Suffering, way of, ii. gt.
produces depth, ii. 53.
triumph of, ii. 63.
result of, ii. 173.
universality of, ii. 272.

Sunshine and mist contrasted, i. 260, 261.

Supernatural, the, i. 271; ii. 121.

Swiss critics, i. 142.
ungracefulness of the, ii. 4.

Sybarites, modern, ii. 269.

Symbols, decay of, ii. 321.

Sympathy, i. 25.
and criticism, ii. 256.
moral, ii. 113.
of Amiel, i. 274.
with our fellows, i. 309-311.

Symphonic pictures, Berlioz’s, ii. 229

Synonyms, passion for, ii. 233.

Systems defined, i. 249.

Tacitus wv. the chroniclers, ii. 237-
Tact, measure, and occasion, ii. 246,

INDEX. 399

Taine on the Ancien Régime, ii. 193.
Taine’s English Literature, ii. 94.
Talent and genius, i. 134.
triumphs of, i. 246.
Tamerlane, ii. 287.
Taste ignored in German esthetics, ii. 97.
v. conscience, ii. 269.
Teaching, successful, ii. go.
the art of, i. 226.
Tears and joy, ii. 64.
origin of, i. 241.
Temperament, character, and individuality, ii. 47.
Temptation our natural state, ii. 55.
Temptations, etc., never ending, i. 259.
Tenderness towards our neighbours, ii. 243.
Thales, hylozoism of, ii, 194.
Theism, Christian, i. 270.
Theory and practice, i. 33, 130.
Thought and feeling, ii. 139.
a kind of opium, i. 135.
Time, flight of, i. 192; ii. 24.
Timidity, Amiel’s, ii. 44, 192.
and pride, Amiel’s, i. 180.
Tocqueville, i. 27, 28.
on obedience, i. 277.
§ To every man his turn,’ ii. 310.
Too late, i. 237.
Toppfer, i. 52.
his tourist class, i. 289.
Totality, Amiel’s tendency to, ii. 43.
Tradition v. force, i. 231.
Trial and duty, i. 260.
Trials, i. 117.
True love defined, ii, 325.
Truth and error, i. 75.
and faith, ii. 118-120.

400 INDEX.

Truth, common fear of, ii. 21.
identification with, i. 99-
rarely sought for, ii. 222.
the test of religion, ii. 212.
Truthfulness, i. 103.
Truths, philosophic, ii. 195.
Turin, i. 94.
Twentieth century, newspaper of the, ii. 344.

UauinEss and beauty, ii. 113, 114.
disappearance of, i. 232.
Unconscious nature of life, i. 179, 193.
Understanding and judgment, ii. r10.
the art of, i. 265.
things, requisites for, ii. 256.
Unexpected, the, i. 116.
Unfinished, the, i. 249.
Unions, a mystery in all, ii. 217.
Unity of action, Amiel’s want of, ii. 258.
of everything, i. 108.
Universal suffrage, ii. 163.
Universe, different relations of the, i. 81.
Unknown, domain of the, ii. 276.
Unselfishness implies love, i. 309.
Usefulness, Amiel’s doubts as to his, ii. 188, 189.
Utilitarian materialism, i. 30.

VacueErot’s La Religion, ii. 31.
Vae victis, ii. 281.
Vanity, the last sign of, ii. 252.
Vesta and Beelzebub, i. 22.
Via dolorosa, i. 158.
Vinet, i. 69.

his praise of weak things, ii. 264.
Virtue a sine gua non, ii. 85.
Visionaries, good and bad, i. 80.

INDEX. 401

Voltaire, i. 309; ii. 232.

Voltairianism, ii. 160,

Vulgarisation, causes of modern, ii. 241.
Vulgarity and nobility, i. 227.

WAGNER, i. 136.
Want, sense of, i. 125.
War, ii. 213, 214.
War rumours, lessons of, ii. 287.
Wariness and kindness incompatible, ii. 264.
Wasted life, i. 237.
Watchwords of the people, ii. 298.
* We’ always right, ii. 164.
Weak, charity towards the, ii. 264.
Weather, caprices of the, i. 215.
Weber, Dr. George, i. 183.
Weltgezst, the, ii. 345.
Weltmiide, the, i. 285.
West and East contrasted, i. 251-253.
Whole, sense of the, i. 187.
Whole-natured men, disappearance of, ii. gr.
* Whom the gods love die young,’ i. 259.
Wickedness, fascination of, i. 239.
Will, England the country of, i. 263.
feebleness of the, i. 107.
preceded by feeling and instinct, i. 88.
the, i. 139.
Winter in Switzerland, ii. 280, 281.
Wisdom, i. 213.
the heritage of the few, ii. 84.
Wisdom’s two halves, ii. 132.
Wit, Doudan’s, ii. 207.
Woman a‘ monstre incompréhensible,’ ii. 16.
and man contrasted, ii. 60-62.
Woman's faithful heart, i. 210.
family influence, ii. 135.

402 INDEX.

Women, austere, ii. 325.
emancipation of, ii. 34.
Manou’s views of, ii. 33-
never orators, ii. 138-141.

Women’s love, i. 304.

Words, careless use of, ii. 240.

Work the flavour of life, ii. 348.

World, meanness of the, ii. 282.

Worship, humanity needs a, ii. 2.

Worth, i. 265.
individual, i. 271.

Writing, the art of, ii. 192.

Youne, secret of remaining, i. 212.
Youth and manhood, i. 50.
renewal of, ii. 27.
revival of, ii. 106.
Youthful impressions, i. 100.
presumption, ii. 159.

ZENO, i. 37; ii- 276.

THE WORKS OF WILLIAM WINTER.

SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND. Library Edition.
Illustrated. 312mo. Cloth. $2.00. Pocket Edi-
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GRAY DAYS AND GOLD: In England and Scot-

d. Pocket Edition. 18mo. Cloth. 75 cents.

OLD SHRINES AND IVY: Containing Shrines of
History and Shrines of Literature. Pocket Edi-
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WANDERERS: Being The Poems of William Win-
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Author. 18mo. Cloth. 75 cents.

SHADOWS OF THE STAGE. Three Volumes.
First Series. 1893. 318mo. Cloth. 75 cents.
Second Series. 1893. 18mo. Cloth. 75 cents.
Third Series. 1895. 18mo. Cloth. 75 cents.

LIFE AND ART OF EDWIN BOOTH. Pocket Edi-
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Cloth. $2.25. This volume contains a full account
of Jefferson’s ancestors upon the stage, and covers
a period of more than 160 years in Dramatic His-
tory — from 1728 to 1894.

ORATIONS BY WILLIAM WINTER. Two Volumes.
George William Curtis. A Commemorative Ora-

tion, Delivered before the People of Staten
Island, at the Castleton, St. George, February
24, 1893. 18mo. Cloth. 50 cents.

The Press and the Stage. An Oration in Reply
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BROWN HEATH AND BLUE BELLS: Being
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WANDERERS ;

BEING

A Collection of the Poems of William Winter.

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18MO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.

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“* But it has seemed to the author of these poems—
which of course are offered as absolutely impersonal
—that they are the expression of various representative
moods of human feeling and various representative
aspects of human experience, and that therefore they
may possibly possess the inherent right to exist.”—
From the Preface.

“The verse of Mr. Winter is dedicated mainly to
love and wine, to flowers and birds and dreams, to the
hackneyed and never-to-be-exhausted repertory of the
old singers. His instincts are strongly conservative; his
confessed aim is to belong to ‘ that old school of English
Lyrical Poetry, of which gentleness is the soul, and
simplicity the garment.’” — Saturday Review.

** The poems have a singular charm in their graceful
por og ol — Scots Observer.

“‘Free from cant and rant—clear cut as a cameo,
pellucid as a mountain brook. It may be derided as
trite, dorné, unimpassioned; but in its own modest
sphere it is, to our thinking, extraordinarily successful,
and satisfies us far more than the pretentious mouthing
which receives the seal of over-hasty approbation.” —
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more vivid and inspiring for the moment than
that of the poet and the painter, it vanishes almost
with the occasion which gave it birth, and lives
only as a tradition in the memory of those to
whom it had immediately appealed. ‘Shadows
they are, and shadows they pursue.’

“The writer, therefore, who, gifted with insight
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“Such a writer is Mr. William Winter, easily
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this country, or in the England he loves so much,
in whose nature the critic’s vision is united with
that of the poet so harmoniously... .

“ Over and above all this, there is in these writ-
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make them unique in our literature.” — Home
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OLD SHRINES AND IVY.

18mMO, CLOTH, 75 CENTS.

CONTENTS.
SHRINES OF HISTORY.

I. Storied Southampton.
Il. Pageantry and Relics.
It. The Shakespeare Church.
IV. A Stratford Chronicle.
VY. From London to Dover.
VI. Beauties of France.
VII. Ely and its Cathedral.
VIII, From Edinburgh to Inverness.
IX. The Field of Culloden.
X. Stormbound Iona.

SHRINES OF LITERATURE.
XI. The Forest of Arden: As You Like It.
Xl. Fairy Land: A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
XIII. Will o’ the Wisp: Love’s Labour Lost.
XIV. Shakespeare’s Shrew.
XV. A Mad World: Anthony and Cleopatra.
XVI. Sheridan, and the School for Scandal.
XVII. Farquhar, and the Inconstant.
XVIII. Longfellow.
XIX. A Thought on Cooper’s Novels.
XxX. A Man of Letters: John R. G. Hassard.
*€ Whatever William Winter writes is marked by felic-
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